Well, you can't make coq au vin with white wine.
You need a coq or it's not coq au vin!
I marinate the meat in the wine over night with aromats.
It doesn't need the sauce reducing if you add a little flour.
Don't mess with an ancient recipe! LOL

Though I make the traditional recipe much as you state it, John, I also have my own "quick" version that I use on cold weekday nights.

I think the flavor is very good, but as the saying goes, you can have it better or faster or cheaper, but not all three.

My shortcuts:

Use ingredients that I more typically have on hand: chicken thighs, sliced yellow onion, pancetta or thick sliced uncured bacon, liquid of 1/2 chicken stock and 1/2 red wine.

I do the first steps pretty much as you describe, then instead of letting it sit overnight, I go straight to the stovetop process, cooking the chicken uncovered in and letting the liquid reduce over about an hour.

The chicken meat does have some purple hue. Since I am not using an old coq, the meat is tender without the lengthy marinating and cooking times. The added chicken broth and use of chicken thighs helps bring in some of the missing "coq-i-ness". It's a very good and satisfying dish. Better than the 2-day traditional process? No. Better than many other meals I typically make on a standard week night? Definitely.

One thing I would say though, is stick with the heavy cast iron cookpot. I don't think this is a pressure cooker dish.

The link below is to flavour injection. I've never gone at my food with a needle and syringe. I suppose I could try injecting some wine? Anyone know what gauge (is that the right measure) of needle I would want (imagine you're in a medical supply place).

Here is a link that might be useful: Flavour injection

Below is the recipe I use. I like it for company, because holds well. I prefer boneless chicken thighs. If you use them, be sure to cut off as much excess fat as possible.

COQ AU VIN

1/4 lb mild sausage
1 lg onion, cut in 1/16ths
3 lg carrots sliced
3 Tblsp butter
1/8 tsp garlic powder
8 pieces of chicken
2 Tblsp brandy, optional
2 Tblsp flour
2 Tblsp parsley, chopped, optional
1 tsp chervil or rosemary
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp thyme, crushed
salt and pepper to taste
1 1/2 cups dry red wine

Melt butter in large, heavy skillet (I use an electric skillet). Add sausage, onions, and carrots. Brown. Add garlic powder. Remove vegetables from skillet. Brown chicken in butter remaining in skillet (add a little more butter if needed). Pour brandy over chicken and ignite. When flame dies, proceed. Move chicken to one side of skillet. Stir in flour and seasonings. When well-mixed and smooth, add red wine. Stir. Return vegetables to skillet. Cover and simmer over low heat for 1 hour. If it is necessary to hold dish for more than one hour, add a tad more red wine or some chicken broth as necessary. Serve with white rice.

I have used an injector add flavor to a turkey we deep fried and it was successful. Mine is a standard marinade injector for cooking.

Last weekend I made an eye of round roast using a simple recipe that I found on the net with a timed high heat start and then finished in a turned off oven with retained heat. I injected some red wine for flavor right before putting the roast in the oven. The roast itself was really good and definitely a cooking method that I will use again. But even in rare roasted beef, the areas where the wine was injected appeared as about inch diameter circles of purple throughout the roast - not a particularly attractive thing. So I don't think I would inject red wine into a meat as light as chicken. When I did it with the turkey, I used white wine and only the bits of herbs were visible in the meat.

Lee

I will try it. Thanks! If I can get the chicken permeated with wine through injecting, then I might be able to speed up the process considerably. Good heads-up on the limited spread of the marinade.

So, in essence, you'll trade off the passive marinating and cooking time for the (what I believe) will be a considerable amount of effort to get your chicken purple in the shortest elapsed time.

I think on this one, John, your idea of better or faster, and mine differ quite a bit.

Let us know how it turns out!

Ann

As Islay said, you need a rooster for it to be authentic...which is why I've never had authentic coq au vin. As I understand it, the marinating in acid (in this case red wine) was necessary to tenderize a tough old male bird.

A surplus of male chickens was guaranteed on a small farm, since roughly half of the hatch would be male. The recipe for coq au vin evolved to make use of these tasty-but-tough superfluous males. (As any modern woman will tell you, the males just aren't that important and you just don't need that many of them.)

In his 'River Cottage Meat Book', Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (great name, eh?) recommends using turkey legs if you can't get a rooster. When the weather cools off a bit I'm gonna try the recipe at the link.

Here is a link that might be useful: turkey legs au vin

Alas, I have a smallish refrigerator, full of science experiments and archeological specimens (''see, kids, this is what homo sapiens ate in 2005'') and often don't have room to chill a 9 qt pot overnight. Also, during a weekend cabin stay, it might be fun to make something that normally wouldn't be possible in a limited time.

Here's another dilemma. Is there any way to accelerate the reduction process? With big shallow pan + uncovered + high heat, it still takes me at least an hour.

My friend has 3 chickens that are old enough that they have stopped laying eggs. I keep telling her that if she kills a couple, I'll make us a coq au vin. Old chicken, blood sauce and all. Unfortunately her son, who is unclear on the concept, thinks the chickens are pets. Plus my friend is vegetarian so I suppose she doesn't see what in it for her.

Look what hit my email box this morning! The Kitchn [sic] has a recipe for 30 Minute Coq au Vin. I can't vouch for the recipe because I've never tried it.

Here is a link that might be useful: 30 minute Coq Au Vin

Well, I'm getting a little insistent here - that isn't coq au vin, it's chicken in red wine! I'm sure it's delicious, just don't wrongly name it coq au vin!

Like islay_corbel (do your friends call you ''isy''?) I draw a distinction between coq au vin and a quickie chicken/wine fricassee.

I make the quickie versions sometimes - most recently Monday, which is what triggered this thread. They are tasty, but different.

My goal for a coq au vin is that the chicken is permeated with wine, the meat is falling off the bone, and the sauce is concentrated and velvet. I'm trying to get that, but faster (and better).

But where can one obtain a rooster so one can make the real thing?

I decline to practice gender discrimination.

LOL John; actually, the poultry industry practices a huge amount of gender discrimination. All the chickens you buy in the stores are female (with the exception of capons, which are neutered males).

One of the higher paid positions at a poultry production facility is the chicken sexer. Yup, it's just what it sounds like. Within a few days of hatching, a highly trained specialist looks at the chicken's nether portions and determines if it is a female--in which case it goes on to get fed and grows up into a chicken--or a male, in which case it is killed. A very few males are allowed to live to propagate the species, but most of them are destroyed. In some places they might let a few males live to become caponized, but if you're a chicken with a Y chromosome, chances are your life span is measured in hours.

The chicken sexer is important to the profitability of the operation. You don't want to needlessly destroy any tender female chickens, and don't want to waste food on any males.

Ladies, don't get any ideas.

bbstx, I bookmarked your link, this 30 minute recipe sounds good, even though it's an impostor; I would add pearl onions .

There is a restaurant I love in WPB that has Coq au Vin on the menu, their sauce is almost like a lacquer, dark and very smooth. I'll ask them if they use coq or poulet....... The meat is not purple though, it's white.

Oddly enough, I have one friend who called me Isy when we were little - but it's really pronounced something like "aïe-la" - it's also the name of an island off the west coast of Scotland where they make excellent whisky.

Ordered a pressure cooker and some hypodermic needles/syringes. I'd like to see if this can be a 30 min dish.

Sacrilège!!!

Cook's Illustrated recently had a feature on fast coq au vin.
It's online but I don't have access.
This month or last month's issue.

All I can find is a 2006 article in Cooks Illustrated, purportedly a 90-minute coq au vin. Their approach is to start reducing a wine/stock mix right away, while browning the chicken and doing everything else.