Lenten Recipes, Week 2: Oven-Roasted Salmon Filet with Dijon-Mayonnaise Sauce

1. Line an oven-safe dish with aluminum foil and preheat your oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

2. Mix together 1 part water, 3 parts mayonnaise, and 2 parts Dijon or whole-grain mustard.

3. Season with salt, freshly ground black pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder.

4. Pat dry 1 salmon filet piece per person, and season with freshly ground black pepper.

5. Place salmon pieces on foil skin-side-down, and then spoon over soy-oyster glaze.

6. Place in oven. Remove after 25 minutes.

7. Serve with rice and vegetables as desired.

Boeuf Bourguignon

Boeuf Bourguignon is a classic French beef stew (made famous here in America by French-trained American chef Julia Child) made with stock (this recipe can be modified to use beef bones instead of chicken, but the process is exactly the same), red wine, and onions. It's a great way to learn to be comfortable with braising, and an all-around great winter comfort food everyone should have in their arsenal of soups, stews, and braises. I have designed this recipe using chuck-- specifically a chuck roast. Chuck isn't really used for steaks per se (like the ribeye, filet, strip, etc.) because it's not really suited for that kind of cooking. Steaks are meant to be cooked relatively quickly over blisteringly high heat in a pan with oil or over a fire-- but without very many liquids. Chuck, on the other hand, is far too tough for this. You can either grind chuck (and combine it with brisket and short rib) for an excellent burger patty, or you can buy a whole roast like I recommend for this. If you buy the whole roast, follow the lines of fat and sinew present in the meat (a typical chuck roast weighs anywhere from 3 to 7 pounds; 4 pounds is ideal here) and cut along them. Then, progressively break down the meat into slightly larger than bite-sized cubes.

The reason chuck doesn't work well as a steak is twofold: first, because of the length and orientation of the muscle fibers, and second, because the muscle used to work literally 24/7 to support its entire weight when the animal was still living. The best steaks are from the muscles that barely do any work at all. Because the animal's shoulder supported so much weight for so long, chuck gets chewy if not tenderized mechanically (by grinding, as I mentioned RE: burgers) or by allowing it to cook at a low temperature for several hours, as I'll prescribe here in this recipe.

Peel and chop 1 pound of carrots, and peel and slice 4 large yellow onions into rings. Wash and slice 1 pound of white, crimini, portobello, or baby bella mushrooms. (A quick note to bouef bourguignon traditionalists: yes, I know I’m supposed to use pearl onions. But I don’t have the time or the patience—and you probably don’t either—to peel the requisite number of pearl onions. I would much rather do less work for the same results (peeling fewer regular onions for the same amount of usable onion) than more unnecessary work (peeling all the baby pearl onions when the big yellow ones work just as well). If you insist on using the smaller onions, go right ahead, but for your sake, I would make sure you buy pre-peeled (usually frozen) baby onions.)

Begin by seasoning the cut chuck with salt and freshly ground pepper and lightly dredge it in flour. Coat the bottom of a large pot or dutch oven with oil. Just before the oil begins to smoke, place the chuck in the pot and sear on all sides. Your objective is not to cook the chuck all the way through-- this wouldn't do that, anyways. You just want to get some color on it and to develop a "fond" (in the American sense, referring to the caramelized bits of flavorful goodness stuck to the pan that most home cooks throw away at their peril; the French use "fond" to mean "stock").

Cut several strips of bacon parallel to the short side of the bacon to create lardons. Lower the heat in the pan to medium-low to not burn the fond, add a touch more oil, and slowly render out the bacon. Reserve.

Saute the carrots and allow the onions to caramelize in the fat already in the pan from the beef and the bacon. This will create a little bit more fond in the bottom of the pan. Use bourbon, cognac, or another liquor (or more wine, if you don't have any liquor) to deglaze the pan. Once the fond has been picked up off the bottom of the pan, add 1 quart (4 cups) of chicken or beef stock, 2 cups of water, 1 bottle of red wine, and 1 can of tomato paste to the Dutch oven and reintroduce the seared beef.

Allow to braise, partially covered, for three hours at 275 Fahrenheit. Then serve alone, with egg noodles, with potatoes, or with your accompaniment of choice.

Sauce Béchamel

As a young kid, I think béchamel sauce was my first exposure to anything “French” in the kitchen. Looking back, Bechamel is probably the best mother sauce to be the first mother sauce a new chef learns because compared to the other sauces, it requires significantly less mise en place, that is, preparatory work before you start cooking to make sure “everything is in its place.” If you’ve already read my article on velouté, then you have a pretty good primer. If this is you, all you need to know is that you should follow the velouté instructions, except your liquid will be milk instead of white stock. If you haven’t read my previous article, stick around and I’ll explain béchamel.

Béchamel is one of the five fundamental sauces of French cooking, one of its Mother Sauces. One of its “daughters,” Mornay (bechamel plus shredded cheese which is melted into it) is the sauce base for American mac and cheese.
Bechamel begins, as does velouté, with what’s called a white roux. A “roux” in French cuisine is a flour-butter paste made of equal proportions of those ingredients which are cooked over low heat to some degree of color which serves as a thickener. If you’ve ever made gumbo, you’ve made a roux which, chances are, was quite dark. There will come a time in this series of articles where we need a dark roux, but béchamel is not that use-case. The proper roux used in a béchamel is cooked down just until the ingredients don’t smell “floury” anymore, but instead take on a rather nutty character (imagine the smell of freshly toasted nuts—that’s what we’re going for, without burning anything). It is especially important that the roux that has been made for a bechamel not be allowed to burn. If there’s even a hint of burned smell coming from your roux, throw it away, clean your pan out, and get more flour and butter to start again.

 
Once the roux is nutty, add milk half a cup at a time until you have enough sauce in your saucepan.  Simmer about 20 minutes on very low heat. Whisk constantly to prevent anything from burning on the sides or bottom of the saucepan, and to discourage the formation of lumps in the sauce. Sauces thickened by roux get more viscous as they cool; as with the velouté, make bechamel only in a time of immediate need to prevent degradation of texture or flavor caused by this thermal thickening. Season a bechamel with salt, freshly ground pepper, and fresh-grated nutmeg.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Photo Credit to Epicurious

Sauce Espagnole

Sauce Espagnole is not very well known per se, but one of its daughters is certainly famous: demi-glace. As Alex mentions in his series, there’s a difference between “demi-glace” and “demi-glaze.” They’re similar enough to espagnole sauce that I’ll cover all three in this entry. As I mentioned in my post on velouté, most of the stock-based sauces I make are not quite a proper velouté (light roux, light stock) or a proper espagnole (dark roux, dark stock), but a hybrid of both that I’m not sure has a name (light roux, dark stock).

Espagnole sauce has three components: tomato paste, a brown stock (traditionally veal, but it can be any protein-- and the recipe I posted for the essential chicken stock works as a method for any protein), and a brown roux. A brown root is a white root that has been cooked longer. The longer a roux cooks, the darker it becomes. If you've ever made gumbo, the color of the room that you need for sauce espagnole is about the same as you would use in a gumbo-- that is, dark, rich, mahogany brown. This can take almost half an hour. But it's better that it takes longer because you're more conservative with the heat then getting it done quickly at high heat and risking scorching something. Never walk away from a roux; as a roux darkens, the rate at which it takes on additional browning accelerates proportionally to how brown it already is. As with a light roux, if it burns get rid of it, wash out the pan, and start over.

The procedure for incorporating the liquid in Espagnole as much the same as it is in velouté and béchamel: incorporate the stock half a cup of time while continuously whisking into the dark roux (which is made of the same ingredients as in the other sauces that use light roux: equal parts flour and butter). Once all the stock is incorporated, whisk in a tube of tomato paste, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cook down for an hour. As with every other sauce thickened by a roux, be mindful of the temperature of the sauce since a roux continues to thicken a sauce even more as it cools. As with those sauces, only prepare the espagnole at the last minute.

Now, on to its first daughter: the “original” demi-glace. That version of demiglace is a 1 part veal stock reduction plus 1 part Espagnole, reduced by half (“demi” being the French for “half). However, there seems to be a more modern version of what exactly a “demi-glace” is that has become popular thanks to the internet—Alex calls this version “demi-glaze” with a “z” to differentiate it from the classic “demi-glace” with a “c”. Demi-glaze with a “z” is simply an ultra-concentrated brown stock thickened slightly with emulsified cold butter—the base of espagnole, without the roux or tomatoes—is what the French, according to Alex, simply call “glace.” This second daughter sauce is far more common than either the mother sauce or the first daughter, and, especially on the internet, will most likely be what you get if you click on a video or text recipe for something calling itself “demi-glace.” 

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

(Credit to the French Cooking Academy) 

Sauce Hollandaise

Hollandaise sauce is at the same time a classic, made ubiquitous in diners by its presence in Eggs Benedict and an enigma, its status questioned by recent revelations uncovered by Alex. More on that second point later. For now, though, let’s get right into the mother sauce that might not be one. Mother sauce or not, it’s a classic, and classics deserve to be made properly.

Let me start out by recognizing just how intimidating Hollandaise can be. In my pieces explaining the way to make the other sauces which were thickened by various colors of roux, you read “DO NOT STOP WHISKING” at least once in each of those recipes. This will be no exception. I’m serious. It’s so important, I’ll say it again now, and then yet again another time later on. When you’re making Hollandaise, DO NOT STOP WHISKING.

Hollandaise is an emulsion of egg yolk, clarified butter, and lemon juice. Emulsions, as discussed in the piece about mayonnaise, are when two substances that shouldn’t normally combine do combine because either by physical force, or by the addition of another substance, or both, they are held together. The reason I have said so many times that you CANNOT STOP WHISKING is that doing so would irreparably break the Hollandaise emulsion. A broken emulsion creates tiny pieces (the size of a grain of rice, if that big) of cooked egg yolk floating around in a pool of clarified butter. There is no way to recover from this. If this happens, throw it away, clean your pan, and start over.

First off, addressing the ingredients. Butter normally contains three things: milk protein solids, water, and fat. Clarifying the butter separates the components by density; skim off the solids and evaporate out the liquids until only fat is left. This pure butterfat is “clarified butter.” This ingredient is one of the cornerstones of sauce hollandaise.

Next, an important point about equipment. Hollandaise requires the use of a double boiler. This is not a special piece of equipment per se, but rather the combination of several common kitchen tools for a specific purpose. A double boiler simply is a bowl placed over the opening of a pan with simmering water underneath. This more gently cooks whatever is in the bowl.

 
To prepare a hollandaise, begin with the egg yolks and lemon juice in a bowl, and set that bowl over a double boiler. Whisk constantly to aerate the sauce and to pasteurize the eggs without scrambling them. DO NOT STOP WHISKING. To that last point, I cannot overstate the importance of keeping the water underneath the eggs only at a simmer; if the water boils, the eggs will coalesce, and an emulsion will be impossible. As you whisk and the eggs cook very gently in the double boiler, the extra air you introduce by whisking and the cooking process should significantly lighten the color. Lemon juice is mostly water, and clarified butter is all fat. Naturally, fat is less dense than water; the egg yolks’ protein matrices will hold these components together.

As the eggs begin to lighten and take on more volume, slowly stream in clarified butter. DO NOT STOP WHISKING. Once all the clarified butter has been incorporated and the emulsion complete, take the sauce off the double boiler, season with salt and cayenne, and serve immediately.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Sauce Velouté

Let me start out by making a quick acknowledgment: Technically, I haven’t made a velouté before, so I apologize if I come off sounding snobbish in giving instructions for a procedure I haven’t done myself. Velouté and its derivative daughter sauces are made with white stock and white roux, and, typically, whenever I make stock-roux sauces, I make a white roux and a brown stock. Not quite espagnole (brown roux, brown stock), not quite velouté (white roux, white stock).

Now, with that out of the way: Velouté starts with white stock. In my previous post about chicken stock, I laid out a protocol for making brown stock (turning meat and aromatic vegetables into umami booster bombs by roasting them in high, dry heat in an oven before submerging them in water and simmering them to create stock). That procedure, as I mentioned in the original post, creates a brown stock. “Brown stocks” look darker and have undergone the Maillard Browning Reaction, hence their name. “White stocks,” on the other hand, are designed to be much milder than brown stocks. (But brown stocks are more versatile, so given the choice between making several quarts of brown or white, I’ll nearly always opt for brown, unless I know I’ll need the stock for velouté, and recommend you do the same.) A white stock, on the other hand, is lighter in color, milder in flavor, and typically not simmered for as long as a brown one.

Crucially, the bones in a white stock are not roasted but blanched. That is, place the bones in your stockpot (alone—no aromatics yet) and cover them with water. Bring the bones up to a rapid boil as quickly as possible and hold them there for 3 minutes. Discard the water and rinse the bones off in cold water. Then, return them to the stockpot with clean water and what’s known as a “white mirepoix” (leeks, mushrooms, peeled onions) as opposed to the “traditional mirepoix” (carrots, onions with the skins on, celery), and simmer for 2 hours as opposed to up to 24 for the brown.

 
Make the white roux in the same way as for the béchamel (equal parts flour and butter cooked out so they don’t smell floury anymore, but nutty instead, without developing color), but, unlike the béchamel, whisk in this white stock instead of milk. Like the bechamel, whisk the liquid into the roux half a cup at a time to prevent lumping, and keep the sauce on low heat until it reaches nappe, the stage where the sauce is thick enough to leave a trail on the back of a spoon, without burning. Simmer about 20 minutes on very low heat. Finally, like the bechamel, remember that velouté, because it is thickened by a roux and not simply by reduction, will continue to thicken as it cools, so prepare the velouté sauce only when it is absolutely necessary.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

(Credit to The Kitchen)

Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is certainly the forgotten one of the five (six?) mother sauces of classic French cooking—all of which are sauces that every cook should know how to prepare well. It’s almost certainly the most common mother sauce. How many times have you seen mayonnaise at the grocery store or at a restaurant? Not even béchamel, the second most common sauce, is seen, bought, or consumed on the scale of mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise in a sense defies the laws of physics that govern the universe. Better stated, it finds a loophole in those laws and then exploits it. Oil and water are not supposed to come together, and yet, in mayo, they do. This happens by way of an emulsion, held together by two things: physical force and an emulsifying chemical agent, which in this case is some kind of mustard. Water and oil are polar molecules, meaning they have positively-charged ends and negatively-charged ends. Left alone, because of their polarities and their different densities (oil floats on water), oil and water will naturally separate, no matter how much whisking or another action that uses physical force to combine the substances is applied to them. Mustard and egg yolks contain molecules that are oleophilic and others that are hydrophilic. Because of this, they can turn the oil into a bunch of microdroplets that cannot coalesce into bigger droplets, holding the oil and water together. Successfully creating this emulsion creates high-quality mayo; failure results in an oil slick on top of all the other ingredients mixed together.

Every part of the procedure for making mayonnaise is designed to make this emulsion as likely as possible to succeed. To this end, I recommend mixing all the other ingredients (vinegar, mustard, egg yolk, and any flavorings, like minced garlic) together, and, only once they’re combined, very slowly incorporating the oil. In his video, it seems like Alex put a whisk attachment on a drill to combine the other ingredients, and then to keep the mixture moving while streaming in the oil. Unorthodox as that approach might be, it certainly works. The average home-cook might not have access to a drill, so three more common tools are just as effective as alternatives: a whisk, a hand-mixer, and a stand-mixer.

Using the hand whisk is certainly the most traditional method, but it’s the most error-prone. Be very careful using a whisk, taking care to always be whisking quickly, vigorously, and continuously. Add il literally a drop at a time in the beginning. As the mixture takes on more oil, you can increase the rate at which you add oil. This is one of the great paradoxes of mayonnaise, and emulsions in general. Vinegar, eggs, mustard, etc., are clearly liquid. Oil is clearly liquid as well. And yet, adding liquid oil into the first liquid mixture turns the resulting emulsion ever more solid as more oil is added.

The hand-mixer is better than the human-powered-whisk method since the whisk attachments are powered by an electrical current and rotate faster than a human could ever rotate a whisk. This creates much smaller oil bubbles in the mixture. The mixture grabs onto smaller oil bubbles more easily than bigger bubbles, and smaller bubbles are easier to trap in a matrix. The easier it is to trap oil bubbles in this matrix, the higher the success rate of the emulsion of the ingredients into mayonnaise.

The stand-mixer approach is in principle the same as the hand-mixer approach, only bigger and better. Stand mixers are generally bigger machines with more powerful motors and bigger whisk attachments. The bigger a whisk attachment, the more air it incorporates into whatever is being whisked. In this particular case, this means the stand-mixer creates even smaller droplets of oil in the vinegar-egg mixture.
But the two electric-powered mixer methods have one potential downfall. An inexperienced chef will assume, just because the electric mixing approach is so much faster and better than any human could be, that the oil can be added all at once and that the delay in adding the oil in the beginning in the first method is only because humans can’t whip as quickly as machines. This is false. Even with the most powerful machine, you still need to add the oil slowly in the beginning.

Whatever method you use to prepare this iconic cold sauce, never lose sight of its foundational importance in French cuisine or of the techniques of building emulsions central to this sauce’s execution. If you do these things, every mayonnaise you prepare from now on will be worthy of the dignity of a mother sauce.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Mother Sauces: An Introduction to a Blog Series Inspired by Alex Aïnouz

Alex Aïnouz (of YouTube fame as “French Guy Cooking) made a wonderful series on YouTube, and what this next series of blog posts will do is go through his series of videos and offer my take on each one of the sauces he presents. But first, some background. I took on the responsibility for almost a year and a half of cooking daily for my parents and me, and Alex has been really helpful by helping me hone the skills I already had and by allowing me to learn new things and explore areas of the kitchen I had never known before the pandemic.

Before the pandemic hit, I had never even so much as heard “mother sauce” or “daughter sauce.” Certainly, I had heard “my mother’s sauce” which is not what is meant by the terms. In this case, however, “mother/daughter” refers to a kind of hierarchy. The French define the five most fundamental—or is it six? We’ll answer that later—sauces as the “mother sauces.” These five sauces are the cornerstones of French cuisine as defined by Escoffier and Carême, two French chefs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were both, in their time, called “the chef of the kings and the king of the chefs.” Escoffier and Carême were so good at their craft, so instrumental in making cooking what it is today that, in all likelihood, there have never been any chefs who have even come close to their influence.

I learned all this from Alex and his 12-part “Mother Sauces” series viewable on YouTube. This series of blog posts will be shorter—only 8 posts—including this one, one for each of the five “traditional” mother sauces, one for the mother sauce unfairly left out, and one explaining why one of the traditional five is actually an impostor. This last one will be a summary of Alex’s research; I cannot take credit for the research, as here I am merely a reporter. I finally feel confident enough in my knowledge of these sauces that, over several months, I have written these articles and they’re finally all ready to be shared with the world.

I have been in the kitchen since I was a toddler: at first, I just watched. I remember having a little purple and green stool that we kept in the kitchen from which I could pay attention. At first, that was my space to just watch, but as I grew a little older, that was my little spot from where I could help my mom cook. I got older, and I started copying my mom’s recipes, or, more often, playing the part of the “sous-chef” to her “chef-de-cuisine.” COVID brought about a change in our home kitchen. I went from a “line cook” or “sous” to the chef in the family. I had more work in the kitchen, but that also meant more time to hone my techniques, develop my own recipes, and turn food into one of the many ways to express love for my family.

Here’s where Alex comes in. I watched his series, and I realized I had never made 3 of the 5—or, really, 4 of the 6—mother sauces at the beginning of my time leading my family’s kitchen, and even fewer of the daughters (since each mother has several daughters). My mom’s family, going back a few generations, were in Italy. Even a hundred-plus years removed from living in Italy, our family’s palette is still very Italian. Classic Italian cuisine uses tomatoes everywhere. There we go: one mother sauce. We don’t have it as often as we used to, but we do sometimes have dishes cooked with béchamel. Watching Alex made me realize those were the only two sauces I had ever worked with. So, I made it my mission to work with all of them.

This next series of posts will first go through each of the five (six) sauces and explain how to make each of them. Every chef should know all of these sauces. They are, after all, the foundation of classical cooking. The last post in this series will address what Alex called his “thesis-level revelation” and, at least in the small corner of the internet in which I have a presence, correct the record, and hopefully make some progress at rectifying a century-old mistake.

This series will cover, in this order, my recipes for béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomate, hollandaise, mayonnaise, and, finally, I’ll explain Alex’s “thesis-level” revelation regarding the last two.

In the series, Alex goes to visit Chef-de-Cuisine Christian LeSquer (***) at the Hotel George V in Paris and at the Chef’s home, learning how to build great sauces from Chef LeSquer and from Executive Chef Romain Mauduit. Chef Le Squer tasks his Executive Chef with teaching Alex how to build sauces, and, at one point, the three of them gather at Chef Le Squer’s house, and the two professionals—the ultimate authority and someone who works immediately under him at a 3-star restaurant in Paris—give a sauce Alex prepares following their advice a very solid 2-stars. 

Chef Le Squer and Chef Mauduit remind Alex that, at their core, every good chef must be a good saucier first. Sauce-making is a lost art in the Western home kitchen, and I want to bring it back, one blog post at a time.

How a translation mistake changed the world's perception of a cornerstone of French cuisine

I mentioned in the introductory post that the last one in this series about the mother sauces would be a summary of what Alex calls his “thesis-level revelation” about the five (or six?) sauces, describing his sources and his conclusions.

At the beginning of the series, Alex does extensive research, quite a bit of which is at the BnF (the French equivalent of the US Library of Congress). There, he finds information that, in his mind, at least might imply (if not definitively prove) a contradiction between his materials and (not hyperbole) almost every other source available on the internet regarding the identity of the last of the five mother sauces. So, Alex emails a contact who is an expert in the history of the French cuisine. Directed by this friend to the “Larousse Gastronomique” by Prosper Montagné, a contemporary of Escoffier’s, Alex must go to the restricted section of the National Library to find a book from 1936. The “Larousse” confirms that mayonnaise, rather than Hollandaise, is the fifth mother sauce. Yes mayonnaise—the same condiment you probably have in your fridge right now—is the fifth mother sauce, and not Hollandaise, until now an undisputed classic mother sauce.

Going down one rabbit hole never ends with the exploration of just that single tunnel. Rabbit holes are rabbit holes precisely because of this: one revelation can trigger more research that leads to another breakthrough that leads to more research, and so on. And so it was for Alex, who, just as he left the Library, was reminded to check for translations in the (public) section of the Library and elsewhere on the internet. The nature of his research then changes, as Alex goes looking for English-language sources since it seems to be that nearly every English-language cooking blog or online cookbook calls Hollandaise, not Mayonnaise, the 5th sauce.

Auguste Escoffier wrote Le Guide Culinaire in 1903—and almost 110 years later, it’s still in print and remains one of the most influential cookbooks, the highest authority possible on French cuisine that both is and supports the legacy of perhaps the greatest chef ever. Four years later, as Alex finds, the English-language translation, done by a “W. Heineman” and published in London. This translation in 1907 misplaces both mayonnaise and hollandaise, putting hollandaise in the “mother sauces” section and classifying mayonnaise as a daughter. That cookbook sold well, and enough people saw it that it started being accepted. Those people taught the next generation of chefs who taught the next generation who taught the next generation who taught the next generation, and now everyone thinks hollandaise is a mother sauce because that’s how things go viral and propagate from generation to generation.

Armed with official confirmation (from the original) that the translation was incorrect, Alex set out to correct the record, creating a brand new “French Mother Sauces” Wikipedia page. However, in the year-plus since he created the page, it has been edited dozens, if not hundreds of times, some of which reverted back to the incorrect information simply because there were more sources saying the wrong thing.

I’m not here to take credit for Alex’s wonderful research or for the Wikipedia article he wrote (and had the great idea of preserving his original work on his website, which you can read here); I am simply documenting this to do what he did: try to reach as big an audience as possible to correct the record as amended by the translation from a century ago and perpetuated by almost every other online source out there, all deriving their notions of which sauces are mother sauces from that faulty translation. What you put on your sandwich is a mother sauce. What you put over your poached eggs is not.

Coq au Vin

Coq au Vin is one of the great classic French braises. True to form as the “poor man’s food” of peasantry-era France, this was not a dish made with a young chicken found everywhere in modern American grocery stores—that dish would be called “poulet au vin,” but this is “coq au vin”—but with an old rooster. To accommodate changing modern tastes, techniques, and ingredient availability, this recipe will cater to the American consumer, but will still maintain all of the core elements of what makes the classic coq au vin the classic coq au vin.

Coq au vin is a braise, which means there are three indispensable classes of ingredients. 1) The thing being braised. 2) The liquid in which that thing is being cooked and 3) The stuff being cooked with the main ingredient in the braising liquid. For coq au vin, those three elements are as follows: 1) chicken (thighs); 2) water, red wine, and brown chicken stock; 3) mushrooms, bacon, and onions.

 Before we get into how to prepare this dish, let’s first talk about where to prepare it. A number of the recipes I’ve already posted on here use an 8-quart stove-save and oven-safe Dutch oven. That’s perfect for this recipe.

 Another thing I’ve been very adamant about in the recipes posted here is the importance of the classical French practice of “mise en place”—“[putting] everything in its proper place [before you start cooking]:” washing, chopping, peeling, etc. Coq au vin will be no exception.

The mise en place for coq au vin itself is rather straightforward and not too demanding. First, separate out a quart of chicken stock (ideally fresh, for which you can find a recipe by clicking here)—if you live in the metric world, go with a liter—and about a cup and a half (350 mL, give or take) of good red wine. Then, clean 1 pound (1/2 kg) of baby bella mushrooms. The “white button,” “baby bello,” and “portobello” mushrooms, the three most commonly consumed mushrooms in the United States, are exactly the same organism, but at different levels of maturity/development, so if you cannot find the baby bella, either of the others I suggested will be fine. Wash and then quarter the mushrooms. Slice 4 ounces of bacon into lardons by cutting them across the length of the bacon strips. Peel 3 onions and remove both the stem and root ends. Then, with your knife parallel to your cutting surface, cut each onion into thirds or quarters and separate out the rings from within each cut. There may be some membrane between the layers/rings of the onions. As you separate the rings, if you find any membrane, remove it.

              This recipe makes use of both the English-language culinary definition of “fond” and the French-language culinary definition of “fond.” We need to develop the first before we can engage the latter. The English word refers to “tasty, caramelized bits stuck to the bottom of the pan that most chefs accidentally waste,” while the French word is the word for “stock.”  Creating a good chicken stock is a very long process, so it will get its own post.  

              Building a good fond (in the English sense) takes time and planning. Begin with the flame off and place the bacon lardons into the cold pan in a single layer. Fat melts at a much lower temperature than bacon becomes crispy, so once the lardons are in the pan, bring the flame up to medium-low, or even low, without any additional fat at first. This low flame will heat the bacon gently and allow the fat a head-start when rendering, so that the bacon can, in a few minutes’ time, fry in its own fat. Once the bacon is crispy enough, remove it with tongs or a slotted spoon, leaving behind the rendered fat. Depending on how fatty your bacon was, you may want to add a few more tablespoons of fat—olive oil is ideal. Now, raise the heat to medium or medium-high  Then, place the onion rings into the Dutch oven, and let them caramelize. This process will not begin immediately. Onions have a significant amount of moisture in them, and that moisture needs to evaporate before the onions can start caramelizing. The onions will need to let go of their moisture before they start frying in the bacon fat and olive oil, and there will be an audible difference between the two processes. Do not allow the onions to burn. This will burn the fond, and you’ll need to start over. Once the onions are in the caramelizing phase, they will have lost a significant amount of volume. When this happens, add 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar to the Dutch oven and add the mushrooms. The mushrooms will go through the same process the onions did: losing moisture first, then frying. Once the onions and the mushrooms are sufficiently browned, remove them from the Dutch oven and set them aside with the bacon.

              Lightly coat the chicken thighs in flour, passing the chicken thighs from one hand to the other to shake off any excess flour. Brown the chicken thighs in the bacon fat/olive oil. This will leave behind the third layer of fond. The goal is not to cook the chicken through, just to give it some color and set a crust so that it doesn’t fall apart in the braising process. Reserve the chicken.

              Build a roux in the pan with the fond over low heat by melting 3 tablespoons of butter and an equal amount of flour. This will create a paste, called a roux. Raw flour is incredibly unpleasant, but cooked flour coated in butterfat turns quite nutty and pleasant. Whisk constantly while the roux is being prepared, and while the stock and wine are being incorporated. If the roux burns, so does the fond, which would require starting over from scratch. Once the raw flour smell in the roux has cooked out, whisk in the chicken stock and wine. This does two things: it emulsifies and thickens the sauce, and it deglazes the pan, dissolving the fond into the sauce. Raise the heat to high for 5 minutes to allow the chemical reactions to take place by which the sauce will begin to be thickened.

              Replace the chicken, mushrooms, onions, and bacon. Allow the chicken to braise uncovered in a 250-degree oven for 3 hours. Depending on the size and strength of your oven, and the depth and surface area of your Dutch oven, you may need to add more water or stock to the sauce throughout the cooking process, or you may need to reduce the sauce on the stovetop over high heat after the three hours.

              Serve with over a starch: mashed potatoes, pasta, roasted potatoes, or spaetzle, for example.