A few years back I taught a cooking class in Auckland where one of the dishes I demonstrated featured duck.
An obviously regular restaurant client of mine, stood and declared, "Boy - are you in for a treat, I have had every duck dish he has served, this chef is truly Auckland's best duck chef."
Flattering yes, but for years after I had something of a phobia that all I was good for was cooking mouth-watering duck dishes. Still, there could be worse fates - duck is, after all, my favourite food.
Duck mastered well is one of those sexy, evocative, textural ingredients that marries well with acidic foods such as citrus, tomatoes, vinegars, and with aromatic spices such as star anise, cassia bark and cinnamon. And it doesn't mind sharing the limelight with other luxury ingredients such as scallops and crayfish.
All of us at some stage must have tried the sticky mahogany birds, found hanging in restaurants, called Peking duck.
This dish consists of a time-consuming procedure of dropping a duck into a simmering soy liquor made with maltose (malt sugar).
The cavity is filled with garlic, anise, cinnamon and shaoxsing wine, then tied to stop leakage during roasting. The next part of the procedure is the real head-turner: you carefully loosen the skin from the breast and pump air into the bird through the neck-end to inflate it into a balloon shape, then hang it to dry the skin before roasting. The juice caught inside is strained and served as the dipping sauce.
For years I have inflated my Peking ducks with a bicycle pump and football needle but one of my Chinese chefs once told me his parents, who ran a restaurant in Melbourne, have a dedicated vacuum cleaner with the hose reversed to blow air into more than 50 ducks a day.
The best Peking duck is determined by how parchment-like the skin is after roasting.
The other duck dishes we are most familiar with - other than buckshot-filled wild birds killed in duck-shooting season - is the French classic duck a l'orange or confit duck, a specialty of France's Gascony region. Confit duck is a centuries-old process in which the duck is salt-cured, then chilled overnight before being braised at a low temperature in its own rendered fat.
A classic method of serving it is to then pan roast the meat until it's crispy on the outside. Beautiful served with saute potatoes and a green salad.
However, for every day, a simple duck breast is far less work and a quick-cooking source of protein. The secret is to score the skin in a criss-cross pattern, then place the breast, skin-side-down, into a cold pan. Bring to a medium heat, and fry until the skin becomes crispy, and starts to spit. At that point flip it over to seal the other side.
But just to please those regulars here is one of my best duck recipes - black lacquer duck.
Quack talent (+recipes)
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