Duck soup

[julesjones]

Food porn, which means that three or four of you will be interested and everyone else will probably be bored witless...

Roast duck for dinner last night. A duck bought from the local Chinese supermarket. Third duck in a row from there with barely enough meat to feed two people, in spite of weighing pretty much spot on five pounds. I have a theory that it is some breed of duck specially bred for duck-three-ways, in that it produces superb crackling, barely enough meat for two, and a lot of very fine stock. And lots of duck fat for later use.

The five pounds included the head and feet, because this was a duck from a Chinese supermarket. They were discreetly removed and disposed of before Other Half, who gets queasy about this sort of thing, could see that it was indeed whole duck. Bread and onion stuffing flavoured with juniper berries and a small sprig of rosemary, moistened with the juice of half a lemon. Cooked covered rather than a proper roast. End result -- beautifully tender, moist, and flavourful duck, and what turned out after chilling overnight to be 400 ml of fat and 100 ml of seriously solid jelly.

The carcase went in the stockpot along with a large carrot and an onion, and more rosemary. Several hours gentle simmering, more carrot and onion, a couple of large potatoes and the jellied juices and chopped leftover meat later, a large pot of soup that's probably going do several more meals. If I consider just the roast dinner last night, the duck was ridiculously expensive -- but there's half a pound of duck fat in the freezer that would have cost me nearly as much as the duck did, and a couple of litres of excellent soup...

Comments

[julesjones]

Never actually had the full duck-three-ways thing, but I would like to try it sometime. The duck is just labelled "duck", but I think it has to be Peking duck or something similar. It's certainly a different animal to whatever the shop-for-white-people gets in. (If I remember correctly, I've seen mallard, Barbary and Gressingham in the local posh supermarket.)

Confit was exactly what I had in mind when selecting the Sunday roast. :-) Another couple of roast Chinese duck dinners, and I'll have enough fat for a dish of confit. Recipe?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Confit was exactly what I had in mind when selecting the Sunday roast. :-) Another couple of roast Chinese duck dinners, and I'll have enough fat for a dish of confit. Recipe?

...is posted. Let me know how it works for you.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

The duck is just labelled "duck", but I think it has to be Peking duck or something similar.

Surely. And they're not bred for Western ideas of meatiness, the cuisine just doesn't think that way. What looks mean-for-two to us will feed six without a blink, when the meal is about flavour and texture and slivers of meat in other contexts, rather than slabs and joints of meat as the prime focus on the plate.

[julesjones]

Yes. And even in a Western context, if you're doing what I'm doing, and treating it as rendered fat and soup bones that will give a couple of serves of meat as well, it's still a superb bird. This week's cost me $10, which sounds expensive (by local standards) in the context of "slabs o' meat and throw the rest away" cooking, but if I bought a tub of rendered fat it would cost me around $6-7 anyway.

The only problem with it is that if you don't realise what you're getting (which I didn't, the first time), it could be a bit embarrassing if you were expecting to serve a Western-style roast to four people. :-) I *expect* duck to have a low ratio of carvable meat to raw weight, but not quite that low.

Hm. Thanksgiving's coming up. Duck leg confit to go with the turkey...