Coq au Riesling: same bottle, the pot and the table
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Hello, Reader, Tonight's post is about a dish — and a principle. The dish is Coq au Riesling: braised chicken in dry Alsatian Riesling with pancetta, leeks, mushrooms, and cream. Served over homemade wide noodles. It is Alsatian cooking at its most direct and its most useful, and it has been on Alsatian tables for a long time. The principle is the oldest logic in wine pairing: cook with what grows there, drink what grows there. The a dry Alsatian Riesling goes into the pot. The same wine comes back to the table. The acidity that kept the braise clean does the same work in the glass — cutting through the cream, refreshing the palate, keeping the dish tasting fresh bite after bite. This is not a complicated dish to make. The technique has a few moments that matter — the sear, the leeks softened before anything else goes in, the cream added at the finish rather than cooked in. The recipe document covers all of it. Find the post and the recipes here. There is also a fresh pasta noodle recipe linked from the post — wide, egg-based, rolled thick. The kind of noodle that absorbs a cream sauce without disappearing into it. Make it this weekend if you can. It is genuinely one of the better ways to understand why a region's wine and its cooking evolved together.
P.S. Serve the wine slightly cool — 50 to 53°F. It will warm in the glass over the course of the meal and show its full aromatic range around 53–57°C. Too cold and the aromatics close down; that freshness is part of what makes the pairing work. Find the post and the recipes here. |