cookery experiments

[julesjones]

I made duck leg confit a couple of days ago, just to see if I could. I tried a bit yesterday, but left it until today to have it as part of a meal, as it's one of those dishes that matures over a couple of days. Cold, it's pleasant but very salty, and I should probably have cured it for less than the 24 hours it got (the recipes I found online varied from a couple of hours to 24-48 hours).

Tonight I reheated a leg by frying it in its own fat, as recommended by a recipe I saw at the beginning of the week and promptly lost. Chucked in a couple of slices of fresh ginger to flavour the fat. Steamed a potato in the microwave for five minutes, then sliced it and fried it in the pan with the duck. Chopped a spring onion and dumped that on top of the frying potatos, and added steamed peas as another vegetable. Since I knew this was likely to be very fatty, I did a rhubarb sauce to go with it, which I will doubtless pay for tomorrow (IBS trigger). Also had a tablepoon of lingonberry jam, as I've thought before that it's sharp enough and the right flavour to make a good substitute for redcurrent jelly on fatty meat dishes.

The duck was salty but extremely tasty, and frying it does crisp up the skin nicely - and drains off a surprising amount of the fat, so if you lift it out with a slotted spoon and let it drain over the pan for a few seconds, you get rid of much of the fat. The lingonberry jam made an excellent accompanying suace, and cut the saltiness as well as the fat. The rhubarb was less successful, but I should probably look up how to make a proper rhubarb sharp sauce instead of just cooking it in the microwave for a couple of minutes with a bit of sugar. :-)

There are three legs left, so those will probably be lunch over the next couple of weeks. And if I haven't completely sickened myself, I shall then make some more, and experiment with different herbs in the dry marinade.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You didn't say which herbs you used in the marinade - juniper, bay, thyme, all the aromatics are good, but the greatest of these is juniper. And salt, as you say - but I always wash the salt off before the long slow cooking in goose fat (or, to be frank, lard: it's the poor man's version, but still good, as is pork confit'd in lard).

And then there's the brave bit, which is covering the confit in more of the fat - to an inch deep above the meat - and storing it in a cool place. For weeks. For months. This is how the process developed, as a way to preserve meat; and behold, it does still work. And the flavour matures over time. I love it.

[julesjones]

Fairly simple one - some coriander seed and cardamom ground into the salt (my favourite poultry spices:-), sprigs of fresh thyme from the garden under two of the legs, and slices of fresh ginger under the other two. There would have been juniper, only this was the point at which I discovered I don't have any. This situation will be corrected next time I go past the Milk Pail. I washed the legs in running water before the actual cooking.

I used a mix of duck fat and some rendered bacon fat that I had in the fridge. (The bacon fat probably did not help on the saltiness front.) Even so I didn't have enough fat to do the full confit with the inch of fat over it, so it's staying in the fridge for a couple of weeks, rather than the full works.

I was going to roast a whole duck first and use the rendered fat from that, but the market had only legs, not whole ducks. :-(

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Sometime I should be brave and buy a duck from the Asian market and cook it. I like duck.

[julesjones]

They are fairly easy to roast. Just make sure you use a good pan that will allow you to save the fat, so that you can use it later.

Roast potatoes done in duck fat are delicious. :-)