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Archive for the ‘Duck’ Category

Wild Duck, Cabbage, Fried Hominy and Red Wine Beet Sauce

Posted in Duck, Food, Game, Grains, Green Vegetables, Root Vegetables, Sous Vide, tagged , , , on February 10, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Duck-Hominy-Cabbage2

I’m still working on my wild duck cooking skill and the best result I’ve gotten so far is through removing the breasts and legs and cooking them separately. I’ve made a “quick salad” for my kids and I recently and I basically sautéed everything for different times and then sliced and served on top of a tart green salad. That was very nice and I achieved the well cooked crispy legs I complained about missing in this post. I also managed to get the breasts to be medium with a crispy skin, but some parts were over-cooked a bit and overcooked wild duck is not a very good thing.

Baked Duck Legs

Wild Duck-Legs-Breast

For this dish I took it to the next logical level and did what experienced cooks and chefs always instruct us to do: cook the breasts and legs separately each to their optimum doneness. It’s that “optimum doneness” part that can be a bit tricky while shooting for a crisp skin on such lean small birds. The way I tackled it is to cook the breasts sous vide and the legs baked in a very hot oven. The legs were well-done and crisp and the breasts were a lovely medium rare and a nice rosy color, even after a quick sear in a hot pan to crisp the skin. Before cooking the meat I simply salted it and rubbed it with a bit of thyme the night before and the breasts were packaged in FoodSaver bags with a bit of butter in  there before going in the  water at 55C for about an hour.

To go with the duck I made red braised cabbage and fried hominy cakes. The cabbage is from Gordon Ramsey’s “*** Chef” that I posted about a while back. It’s a very simple recipe of cabbage, butter and vinegar. The end result is delicious and very flavorful, much more than the sum of its parts. The hominy cakes are another direct rip off from Hank Shaw where he also pairs it with duck, canvasback to be exact. I followed Hank’s recipe verbatim and it worked perfectly. The grits cakes held together and had a great crispy exterior and a lovely soft interior. The flavor was mild and it really offset all the other robust flavors in the dish from the duck, cabbage and sauce. The dish needed the texture and the cakes delivered it in strides. The bread crumbs I used were made from a loaf of bread I baked with poppy seeds and that’s why the cakes’ crust has all these little black specs in it. That looked pretty neat and worked well with the sort of Germanic theme of dish.

Hominy Grits Cakes

Hominy Grits Cakes2

The sauce here is based on the duck carcasses. After removing the breasts and legs, I cut up the remaining bones and trimmings and made a stock with them. I wanted the stock to be robust and full of flavor, so I first roasted the cut up oil-rubbed carcasses and sautéed a bunch of aromatics in the drippings in the pan. Then I deglazed the pan with Madeira and sherry vinegar. Everything went in the pressure cooker and cooked at 15 psi for about an hour and half. I ended up with a good 1.5 quarts of amazing duck stock. I used about a cup for the sauce and the rest is now frozen for other applications (possibly an oyster and duck gumbo to use up the last three birds I have in the near future). The sauce is prepared like a traditional red wine sauce made by simmering red wine and aromatics with the addition of chopped fresh beets. I added the beets for color and flavor, another item that to me sounds Germanic as well. After the wine is reduced I added in the duck stock and allowed that to reduce a bit as well before enriching with a bit of butter. The sauce had everything I was looking for a rich color and deep flavor.

Duck-Hominy-Cabbage

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Roasted Teal with Delicata Squash, Farro and Spiced Red Wine Sauce

Posted in Duck, Food, Game, Grains, Green Vegetables, tagged , , , on December 18, 2012 | 1 Comment »

Teal-Farro-Delicata-Spiced Wine

About a month or so ago I finally got all my plans in order and booked a hunting trip with a local guide to see if I can get myself some wild ducks. It’s been many years since I’ve been hunting but finally I get myself a gun, license and practiced some clay shooting at local range to get the rust out of my shooting. In no small way I have Hank Shaw to thank for the motivation. To say his hunting, fishing and cooking articles at his blog and in his book, “Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast” were inspiring is an understatement. All in all, I ended up with several mallards that day and a couple of nice teal. Teal are small, about the size of a pigeon and are supposed to be delicious so I wanted to show them off by cooking them whole.

Teal

I roasted them simply by following Hank’s instruction. I first seasoned them with salt and a mixture of orange zest, allspice and thyme. I then baked the birds in a very hot oven to a medium rare. That worked well for the breasts, but honestly I was not crazy about the texture of the legs. They remained a bit tough for my liking and the skin did not crisp as well as I would’ve liked either. The flavor of the teal though was very good. They tasted rich and robust but not too gamy. I’m glad I made a full-flavored sauce to go with them. The sauce is from a Mario Batali recipe in the Babbo Cookbook and it’s not much more than a reduced red wine sauce flavored with allspice and cloves. Batali serves it with venison and a pumpkin caponata.

Teal-Farro-Delicata-Spiced Wine2

I took another page from that recipe and made a much simplified version of that caponata using Delicata squash which is amazingly sweet. I roasted it and then tossed it with sauteed onions, raisins and red wine. To make this more substantial I tossed the squash with cooked farro. The combination was very tasty, like a rustic and comforting risotto.  The flavor of the birds was wonderful with the spiced wine sauce and the earthy squash farro.

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Cassoulet and Green Salad, Country Bread and Red Wine, Walnut Tart – A Dinner from Southwest France

Posted in Baking, Book Recipes, Bread, Breads and Pies, Duck, Food, Green Vegetables, Legumes, Pastry, Pork, Sausage, tagged , , , , , , , on December 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

A long titled post suitable to a properly labor-intensive and delicious cold-weather meal. Both the Toulouse-style Cassoulet and the Walnut Tart are based on Paula Wolfert’s recipes in her book “The Cooking of Southwest France“. The bread is the Pain de Campagne (country bread) recipe from Peter Reinhart’s “The Bread baker’s Apprentice“.

Making a proper Cassoulet is a good bit of work and to get the most out of this dish you really should not cut corners. Boiling some beans and adding in a couple of sausages might be good, but is really not the same animal. It’s almost “wrong” to make a Cassoulet that does not take a couple of days worth of work (mostly unattended simmering or resting). It’s part of the enjoyment that goes into it when you crack that crispy breadcrumb crust that you know how much work really went into making this sublime dish.

It helps a lot having a freezer and larder that is fully stocked. I already had home-cured pork belly (pancetta), home-cooked duck confit, good rich stock (venison in this case), trimmed and cleaned pig skins, home-made Toulouse-style sausage and a few pounds of wild boar. This means I could dive right into cooking the Cassoulet and putting these items together without having to worry about making confit or shopping for pig skins and duck fat.

So, what is involved in making a Cassoulet?

- Simmer pork shoulder (I used wild boar), pig skin, along with aromatics and vegetables (leeks, carrots, thyme, bay, a little tomato paste…)  until mostly tender.

- Add in a pound or 2 (Wolfert uses two for a HUGE Cassoulet, I used one to make half a recipe) of soaked white beans and cook until tender.

- Seperate the beans and stock from the meats. Store in the fridge overnight or for a few days.

- Enrich the stock by pureeing some of it with garlic and pork fat. Add that to the beans, rest of the stock and the pork chunks. Simmer for a little bit.

- Remember those Toulouse sausages I mentioned earlier? Cook those separately. I cooked them sous vide till done. Cut them into pieces.

- For the duck confit, just remove the skins, take the meat off the bones and leave it in big chunks.

- “Build” the Cassoulet by first laying the flat pieces of cooked pork skin (the one we simmered with the beans) in the bottom of a large pot. I used one of my Colombian Chamba clay pots.

- Top that with half of the bean mixture, then the duck confit. Top with the remaining bean mixture. Use a perforated spoon here so that you can control how much of the bean stock is needed. I ended up using all of it for the liquid to come up barely to the level of the beans.

- Bake the Cassoulet for an hour or two. A skin will form on the surface. Stir that “skin” into the Cassoulet. Bury the cooked sausage chunks in the beans leaving them slightly exposed. Top with a tablespoon or two of breadcrumbs and a drizzle of duck fat. Bake until crispy, bubbly and delicious.

- Let it rest for 5-10 minutes at least and dig in.

It really sounds like much more work than it is. Most of the cooking can be spread out over a couple of days and you will be rewarded with one of the most delicious of French comfort foods ever. It’s one of those dishes that if done right are satisfying and rich but not cloying. It should not be mushy or fatty. To get that result, one needs to pay attention to the small details.

Detail1: DO NOT let the beans boil like crazy. As soon as the stock comes up to a boil lower the heat to a very gentle simmer. This way you can control the cooking process better and can cook the beans perfectly. Rapid boil will almost insure burst beans. This will make for unpleasantly mushy beans, a thick cloudy stock and will emulsify the fat in it making it more difficult to de-grease.

Detail2: A key reason why a good Cassoulet should be stretched over a couple of days is de-greasing  the stock. Storing the beans in the cooking liquid in the fridge will form a thick layer of fat on the surface from all those meats. It’s easy to remove that before continuing with the cooking and baking.

What to serve it with? Other than red wine? You really don’t need much else, but a piece of good bread and a tart salad are excellent accompaniments. I shaped the bread specifically for the Cassoulet dinner into an epis (wheat tip) so we could just break off pieces instead of slicing…and it looks pretty neat. The salad was a simple mixed baby greens mix with a vinaigrette of raspberry vinegar and walnut oil.

It only seemed appropriate that to cap it all off, I would make a dessert from the same region. So from the same book, I made Wolfert’s walnut tart or as she calls it Walnut Tart from Masseube. This is not a typical tart, more of a cross between a cookie and a tart. The filling is a mixture of walnuts and a dark butter caramel. This gets poured into a tart shell lined with a sweet short pastry crust. Another layer of pastry goes on top and then it is baked. When the tart cools the filling sets pretty firm, like a pecan pie filling minus most of the “goo”. We really loved this with a cup of coffee and a touch of whipped cream.

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Thai Duck, Barley, Pumpkin puree and Banana pudding

Posted in Duck, Food, Grains, Green Vegetables, Sous Vide on November 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

The combination of pumpkin (or butternut squash in this case) and banana seems has been something I’ve wanted to try out for a while. Specifically since I saw it in an Alinea dish combined with duck. In the Alinea cookbook the recipe is for a pumpkin soup and bite of grilled duck breast with a dollop of banana pudding all flavored with Thai-inspired components. Carol cooked this dish on her blog, and Martin made it as well on his fantastic Alinea blog. The combination popped up again on Ideas in Food, this time in what appears to me as a dessert and combines raw and cooked pumpkin with crumbled and pureed banana. For my take on it I used Alinea’s recipe as a guide/template but made it into more of an entree as opposed to a small soup course.

I brined boneless skin-on duck breasts in a liquid with Thai flavors comprised of fresh pineapple juice, salt, brown sugar, chillies, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, ginger and cinnamon. All the brine ingredients were brought up to boil along with water and allowed to steep for a few hours. After straining and chilling, the duck went in there for about 3 hours. In hindsight, I think more time in the brine would’ve even made for a better duck.

The banana “pudding” was done in the now-familiar Alinea style for these sauces. Roasted banana and banana chips were simmered with half and half and agar agar then allowed to set. I then pureed it in a blender and added kaffir lime juice. I almost never see fresh kaffir limes, so when I saw some at Central Market while shopping for this dish, I immediately picked some up and knew I will use the zest and juice. I roasted the butternut squash and to make a puree I simmered the roasted flesh with a little cream and duck stock then passed it through a sieve to make a smooth puree. After tasting it, I decided it needed a little more sweetness to round the flavor and make it a better match to the kaffir flavored banana pudding and the tart pomegranate sauce. I did not want to add sugar though so I used grape molasses. In Lebanon this product, called Dibs Inab, is eaten as a snack mixed with tahini and bread is dipped in it. It is delicious like that but I love to use it as a component in dishes just like any other syrup. It is sweet but n0t cloying and has a great flavor that is a bit smoky and reminds me of chocolate to some point. So a couple of tablespoons of that rounded the squash puree’s flavor nicely.

I wanted to add an interesting tart element and first thought of a cranberry coulis. However, pomegranate juice seemed even more appropriate. I just blended it with Ultratex-3 until it thickened properly. The barley was done following a procedure from another Alinea recipe. I first cooked it with in water, then dried it in a dehydrator (aka my countertop electric convection oven). An hour or so before serving, I fried the dried cooked barley in very hot oil until puffed a bit and became nice and crunchy. This stuff is delicious and a very addictive snack. It works well in savory dishes or on ice cream. It definitely added a much needed textural variation to this dish and a nutty taste.

I removed the duck from the brine, and sealed it in a FoodSaver bag. It was then cooked Sous Vide at 132 F for about an hour. Before serving, I seared the skin side only on low heat to crisp and brown the skin. On the plate went a long “squiggle” of the banana pudding flanked by the squash puree. Duck cubes went on top of the banana and were garnished with a small dollop of the banana pudding. That drop was used to anchor the garnish of red chilli, cilantro leaves and candied kaffir lime zest. I topped the squash puree with dots (waited too long to take the picture and the dots “ran” a bit) of the pomegranate sauce.

The dish was delicious and I would be happy to make it again. The flavors worked great together and the crunchy nutty barley was a perfect foil for the squash and juicy medium rare duck.  The colors of the dish look great as well, but I am not too happy with the overall plating. It’s a bit sloppy because the plate is a bit too narrow. Next time I will more than likely serve this in a square or round plate.

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Duck Confit with Corn Cakes

Posted in Duck, Food on July 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Work has been kicking my ass lately and I barely have time to actually cook some interesting stuff let alone post about it. This was more or less a spur of the moment dish that turned out amazing. I have several duck legs confit in the freezer and some pepper jelly in the fridge (yes, pepper jelly that I made like 4 years ago). Where did the combo of confit and pepper jelly come from? An old Emeril Lagasse recipe  actually. For some reason I instantly thought of these corn cakes topped with a mixture of duck confit when I saw the pepper jelly in my fridge door.

The recipe came together fairly quick. The corn cakes are a standard pancake or cornbread really made with cornmeal, flour, buttermilk and flavored with red pepper flakes and sauteed shallots. For the topping, I reduced duck stock to about 2 Tablespoons and added an equal amount of pepper jelly. Into that went the shredded duck confit and heated through. The pepper jelly is made with vinegar so it is sweet and sour and really work great with the fatty duck. The cakes were shallow fried in olive oil to crispy on the outside and soft interior. A few dollops of sour cream rounded everything very nicely. The leftover corn cakes made great snack the next day after a trip to the toaster.

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