Every two years, we make a trip to France to visit relatives. It’s always a trip that includes a lot of catching up, sharing family stories and of course, cooking. When we visited two years ago, Chris and I were telling my cousin about a vinegar chicken recipe that we often make. The rest of the evening became a conversation about the numerous methods of cooking, vinegar chicken or “poulet au vinaigre.” Chris and I tried to explain our method and Jacqueline and Francoise tried to explain theirs.
Our recipe is a simple, vinegar, butter, shallot combo while theirs includes cream, wine, garlic and of course, Armagnac.
In the past two years we’ve been trying to recreate the meal that we had that one wonderful night in the Pyrenees, May of 2008.
Chris and I won’t rest until we get it right and when we do, we’ll have documentation. We disregard our previous attempts and declare a “do-over.”
Here is poulet au vinaigre attempt one:
Brown the chicken in olive oil & butter. Add garlic in the skin. Cook 10 mins.
Remove chicken and add:
white wine
armagnac
red wine vinegar
dijon mustard
chopped tomatoes
creme fraiche
butter
cook this for 15 minutes and then add the chicken back into the mix and cook for another 20 mins.
I converted all the measurements to imperial and then found it was easier to go back to metric. I followed what I had written down on my little scrap paper.
The end result:
Olive oil gets lost and is too heavy an oil to use for browning.
We added too much armagnac and dijon.
Sauce would have benefited from a longer reduction. Maybe that would have mellowed the assertiveness of the armagnac and dijon.
Overall, it was still a very good meal.
