The old apocryphal story of Chicken Marengo is one of Napoleon's chefs finding only hens and mushrooms while invading Italy and coming up with a dish, with Napoleon liking it so much that it was made before every battle.
Whatever.
Every recipe I've ever seen for it is wildly different. Some contain dried apricots, while others have a bunch of olives. Generally speaking cooking chicken in a Dutch oven will yield something yummy, so play around with it.
1. Cut a chicken into its eight useful parts. Salt and pepper all sides.
2. Put 1 TBSP olive oil and 3 TBSPs butter in a frying pan and melt the butter.
3. Brown the chicken pieces, skin side down first, for about 10 minutes each side. (We're just browning for flavor. We aren't cooking the chicken, nor are we "locking in any juices".)
4. Dump the pan's contents into a dutch oven, butter and oils included. (Carefully.)
5. Add to the dutch oven: 3 large tomatoes, skinned and diced; 3/4 lb of fresh mushrooms (I use tiny snow caps, uncut); 3 cloves of garlic, SMASHED; 1 cube of chicken bouillon, chopped up; some parsley, thyme and a bay leaf.
6. Pour 1 1/3 cups of white wine over the whole thing. (I used cooking sherry last time. Worked fine.)
7. Put the lid on the Dutch oven and cook at 325 for about an hour.
8. After an hour or so, remove a TBSP of the liquid and mix it with 1 TBSP flour.
9. Stir that into the dutch oven, and cook for another 15 minutes or so.
10. Enjoy. (Don't eat the Bay leaf. )
So...the main difference between this an coq au vin is the gender of the bird & color of the wine?
ReplyDeleteNot quite. Coq au vin is braised in the wine and the mushrooms are added during the last five minutes. It stays on the stove and never goes in the hot box like marengo.
ReplyDelete