What's old is new again - Coq au Vin

Lately I have been thinking quite a lot about the food we did when I was the chef at Rosewater for three years. A few days ago I had quite a lengthy conversation with a colleague about going back towards that type of cooking and how I used to approach the menus and individual dishes. One dish that seemed to have a recurring spot on the menu when the weather turned cold was Coq au Vin. Each time the dish appeared there would be a change to it somehow, someway. Maybe it would be the garnish, the cooking method, accompaniments, something.

To understand the process you first must understand the classic dish on itself. Coq au Vin is a braise of chicken that has been marinated in redwine and cooked with lardons(salt pork - cut crossway in strips), mushrooms, garlic. The bird is browned in its own fat, braised until tender and then thickened either with a roux or with blood.

Very much a farmhouse dish to bring it to a fine dining standard, one of the necessary elements is already there, flavour. The next step is to take some creative license to take what is old and make it new again. All the original elements of the dish would be kept with new twists added. The breast would be kept separate from the thigh and drumstick which would be marinated. We might use cornish hen instead of chicken or capon. The mushrooms, garlic and lardons would remain garnish for the finished sauce, sometimes we would add pearl or my preference cippollini onions.

So lets recap our ingredients;

Cornish Hen - broken down into, breast thigh, drumstick. Use the back and wings to make a stock for your sauce.

Sauce - red wine, stock from back and wings of the hen, mire poix, thyme sprigs, sweet butter

Garnish - bacon lardons(thick sliced bacon slice crosswise into matchsticks), mushrooms, cippollini onions, picked thyme

Accompaniments - Yukon potato, butternut squash. At Rosewater we would cut the potato into a cylinder and prepared as a fondant potato. The squash would be slowly cooked in butter to a silky smooth puree and reserved to make a quenelle.

Cooking methods

Breast - roasted and finished in the sauce
Thigh - confit(rendered chicken fat is your best option, but you can use duck fat or even a vegetable oil) and then crisped up on final preparation
Drumstick - braised and reheated in braising jus that is also used as the base for the finished sauce.
Potato - fondant. To make the fondant potatoes at Rosewater the entre metier would first braise the potatoes in stock with onion, leek, celery, carrot, stock and sea salt, black peppercorns, thyme. In a s/s hotel pan the potato would be covered in foil, brought to a boil on top of the stove and then finished in the oven until just becoming tender. The potatoes would then be allowed to cool and rest in the braise for one day. The next day they would be lightly deepfried just to form a skin. Final preparation they would be cooked on the stove in a good amount of butter with a thyme sprig until they had a golden crust with a soft buttery texture inside.
Butternut squash - peeled, seeded, cubed and place in a sauce pan with a good amount of sweet butter and place on a low flame, cover, season with sea salt and allow to slowly cook stirring regularly.

this taking longer than I thought so I am going to finsh on my next post