duck + chestnuts

Duck breast, dry rubbed with thyme, salt, and pepper, seared and finished with a wine-duck-cherry sauce (reduced wine, duck stock, sour cherries that have been soaking in grain alcohol with hibiscus and orange peel, and the faux-demi-glace that you get when making duck confit). This, with Julia Child's purée of chestnuts, which has left me with fingers numbed from peeling hot chestnuts but nevertheless sated, thinking it was well worth it.

cassoulet

You cant go wrong with Jennifer McLagan: This is her cassoulet, and the verdict tonight was that it soars above others. Of course, with a book entitled Fat, what could go wrong?

Jennifer's recipe for duck confit, while not pictured, is flawless and important. That process began days ago, leading to pork skin and then the skinned duck confit layered upon Great Northern beans, having been cooked with thyme, parsley, cloves, and leeks (a subsitution in the recipe for onions):

Atop that was lamb and pork belly, and another layer of beans. The beans are actually a mix of the aforementioned beans with cooked tomatoes, all of which forms another layer (which is actually less wet than the photo suggests). The beans are studded with andouille sausage:
 

Baked for three hours with bread crumbs and chopped duck confit skin (another modification: I thought that the skin would slowly render into the crust, and it works!), it becomes this:

I served this with kale stewed in chicken stock. As it is so rich, this was preceeded by fermented beets, raw fennel, and a mixture of olives. 

We ate this with the kale, garnished with parsley and Tierenteyn mustard. The mustard and parsley pulls it all together. 

With such a rich meal, a following salad course of endives and watercress in lime, olive oil, and pistachio oil made way for Miss Fat's fabulous apple cake with whipped cream and a fantastic walnut topping.

matsutake in broth

Matsutake, day two.

A mix of very clear chicken and duck broths, lightly salted, and brought to the point of almost simmering. I let that reduce slowly while doing other things.

Add julienned leeks and thinly sliced matsutake. Bring to a quick simmer, serve immediately, garnished with a few drops of sesame oil.

Absolutely incredible. The broth was full-bodied but simple, the leeks lent a mild allium kick, together making a perfect backdrop for the lightly poached matsutakes.

fiddleads, duck & brussels sprouts

Last time A. came to visit she was very pregnant. This time she was with her adorable six-week old. Something special was in order. We had duck breast marinated in red wine and ground mustard seeds (brown/yellow) with a raspberry melomel (mead) reduction, fiddleheads sautéed in duck fat and a few pickled brussels sprouts (they were embedded in some sauerkraut from the fall!). I was quite happy with the result.


A. also brought Prosecco and pomegranite juice which were mixed to create a cocktail that went wonderfully with the duck. It was really good. And that we finished off with a pear-hazelnut torte (from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors):

rillettes

Duck rillettes. Quite possibly one of the most delicious things on earth. Rillettes is potted meat, from the Old French rille, or "strip of lard" (Robert Historique). Traditionally made with pork, duck or other fatty meats will work.

Here we go. (Recipe inspired heavily by Jennifer Mclagan's recipe in Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient [2008])

Take a duck and take it apart. Reserve extra fat for rendering (above right), use breasts for another use (see last week) and make a damn fine stock with that carcass. Keep the bones in the legs and wings. Marinate all of that overnight with coriander, pepper, orange peel, pork belly (or blanched salt pork), bay leaves and a splash of vermouth (or white wine, the vermouth is in tribute to Julia Child, who seemed to have loved it for cooking.)

Drain and sear the meat, fat side down, until nice and dark. Cast iron is ideal. Add marinate. Cover and bake at 250º for a while — I went for 3½ hours. (Added a splash of port after an hour.) And then two more hours at 200º. And then I let it cool for an hour in the oven, uncovered.

Above left is what's left: beautiful dark meat, falling off the bones (make a second stock with those bones, it's worth it). Shred every bit of meat that you can get off the bones, and then shred every bit of fat. Work it all together and add the liquid (which you've reduced to a thick sauce) from the roasting, as well as some of the fat. A splash of calvados or brandy here is nice.

Pack it all into ramekins, and then cover with a layer of clean duck fat. Let that sit in the fridge for a few days. It'll keep like that for, they say, months. Once the fat seal is broken, eat it in a few days. (Eat at room temperature.)

And here it is, on a sourdough baguette. It is very very good. Riduculously good.

kaga-style duck

The duck adventure continues (one duck will go a long way for one person, which either makes me look greedy or lonely)! This is another recipe from Hiroko Shimbo: "Duck prepared in the Kaga style." The duck breast was seared and then sliced thin and dipped in flour (I used wheat and brown rice flours, recipe called for wheat and buckwheat...) and allowed to rest. They are then re-dredged. Meanwhile a broth of dashi, sake, a bit of sugar, mirin and shoyu is prepared. Leeks are then quickly parboiled in that mixture, removed and followed by the floured duck strips. The result was very tender and unlike anything I've tried: The flour forms a nice skin but obviously hasn't been fried. Miraculously, it doesn't make a mess in the broth, which is then ladled over the duck and leeks:


(Duck rillettes, to be consumed next weekend, were actually the reason for me having extra duck breasts for my own amusement and consumption: that adventure started two days ago and will be done in a few more. I like that every part of the duck went somewhere: stock, rendered fat, cracklings, rillettes, teriyaki, poached duck breast...)

cracklings

Since I had the whole duck, and needed fat to top of the rillettes when I make them, I rendered some fat (and made stock with the carcass). Aside from how beautiful clear duck fat is, let us note how duck cracklings are really fucking delicious.

teriyaki

So, I have a whole duck. And I started taking it apart this morning: legs, wings, neck and a good deal of the extra fat were marinated for rillettes (you'll see that result in a week). I rendered a lot of the fat from the breasts and neck, and here I am with two breasts. Hiroko Shimbo's recipe for duck teriyaki was most tempting. Most of the fat is removed from the brests. They are then tossed into a very hot pan and seared (and Shimbo suggests blanching, but I removed too much fat so I figured they didn't need it). Simmered in saki (I used saki and white wine, lacking enough of the former), sugar and mirin, — and then shoyu — they are set aside. Orange juice is added to the sauce and it is reducd (see above) and seasoned with tamari and rice vinegar. The duck then rests in the sauce (10 minutes, but 5 suited me) and is plated and garnished with the sauce and scallions (or naganegi, which I have never seen). The duck was wonderfully tender, the sauce sweet but with enough savory to balance it, and brown rice was perfect with both.

The salad is a quick pickling of carrots: ume and brown rice vinegars tossed with carrots. Forty minutes later and it's great (be careful with ume vinegar, it is excepionally salty).

roast duck

Sunday I made myself a full-on Sunday dinner. I roast a duck (simply, with just sage, thyme, onion salt & pepper as seasoning -- the herbs being part of my garden-in-pots, all that's left as we just moved) and some vegetables (leeks, potatoes and rutabagas). The duck was very very good -- I roasted it following Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 1. -- and I had it with a pinot noir-based gravy (easier than her stock-port reduction, frankly). The vegetables I basted with some duck fat, instead of the usual oil, and they were nicely caramelized (and the rutabaga wonderfully sweet.)

Last night I saw duck legs for $4.99/lb. And supposedly all-natural all-of-that. (Breasts at at least twice that, naturally.) As I've wanted to make duck for a while now (since realizing that duck, unlike chicken, has flavor), I figured I'd give it a go. I'd had confit, magret and breast before, but never a leg that wasn't confit.

I looked through recipes, most of the books I have sugesting roasting or braising, but mostly as a duck or a breast or a leg confit. I ended up marinating the legs in a Côtes du Rhone with rosemary and sage for an hour, then searing until caramelized and braising until "done." Well, had I not forgotten my research, that should take about an hour and a half. Not the forty minutes that - maybe, if that - I gave myself.

The leek-potato soup that I distractedly made earlier-and-during, as well as the earlier-and-during baguettes, were a bit sad, the former not thick enough and the latter not light enough. The soup was good, and the bread wonderful with gravy, just not my best effort. (The bread I had tried as an overnight rise, which was part of the problem. In cast iron and free-form is one thing; in a baguette form is another.)

Anyway, duck, braised, with spinach sautéed in duck fat (and fond) with a quarter preserved lemon and a reduction of the braising liquid was delicious but a bit tough. I took the second leg and roasted it, so we'll see how the twice cooked leg fairs tomorrow for lunch.

On a literary note, started a cover-to-cover read of South Wind Through the Kitchen, an Elizabeth David collection. She refused to sell garlic presses at the shop that she owned. Sigh. And, for the moment, I sell high-end culinary gadgets -- no, "tools," claims the Rösle rep., -- for a living. Some things are tools, some things are gimmicks. (Who am I to make the distinction?)

I purchased Euell Gibbons's Stalking the Wild Asparagus tonight. That and the David book (and Mann's Joseph...) at once. Gibbbons makes me wish it were fall and I had the foraging skills of a squirrel and I'd make acorns into acorn meal, and then acorn meal into acorn pancakes. I like that he admits that much of the edible flora he omits from the book as it's edibly inedible. It makes him seem a bit more reasonable.

And that makes me think of a delicious succulent green that I ate up the slopes of Mount Eisenhower with my 12th grade Biology teacher. Joseph Rodrigues, what became of you? And what was that plant?