Honey-Glazed Roast Duck and Bourbon-Pickled Jalapenos

This weekend seems to be the weekend for posting about hunks of roasted meats.  On Saturday I posted a roasted pork shoulder.  I finally got around today to posting about the honey-glazed roast duck that we made from Ed Lee's cookbook back on New Years Day.  Pathetic, huh?  I have no real excuse for being so delinquent in my posting, except that work is busy and we have been traveling a bit.  It is particularly sad given how incredibly excited I was by this meal (both before and while eating).  My laziness has nothing to do with how much I liked this duck.  I LOVE duck in general and I thought this roast duck had really good flavor.  It's no replacement for Peking duck, but it was a nice take on roast duck.  My biggest compliant about the duck was that the skin needed to render more.  It was still fatty and not at all crispy.  It was more... sticky (and a little rubbery).  I dunno if our duck was just fattier than the duck that Ed Lee uses - he might use some sort of free range duck with more flavor and less fat.  But it was still really good.  I loved the bourbon-pickled jalapenos that we served with it - they were the perfect boozy, sweet and spicy accompaniment for the richness of the duck and the sweet flavor of the glaze.  Definitely serve the duck with some herbs and thinly sliced cucumbers because that freshness also works to cut through the fattiness of the duck.

Recipe after the jump!

Roast Duck Breasts with Pomegranate-Chile Sauce

It looks like today is a poultry day.  I started off the morning with a post about roast chicken breasts and now I am following it up with roast duck breasts.  I have a number of other posts that I could substitute for this one, but I am kind of digging the poultry theme I have going on so I am going to stick with it.  Anyway, this duck recipe is what I served Alex and my father for Christmas dinner.  There were other sides and such that went with it (including a version of this salad to which we added radishes and cherry tomatoes and a pumpkin cornbread - more on the cornbread later).  Since I was cooking I got to pick the recipes and duck was a no brainer because it is is one of my absolute favorite things to eat.  As far as I am concerned, a nice Peking duck is one of the finest meals in the world (a nice seared duck breast is a close second).  Brussels sprouts were another no brainer because I love them dearly and they are easy to roast.  This duck breast is one of those dishes that is more than the sum of its parts.  When I first tried the pomegranate-chile sauce I wasn't sure what I thought - it had a lot of flavor from the pomegranate juice, the adobo sauce and the dried chiles.  It was interesting, but I wasn't sure how it would go with the duck.  In some ways it almost reminded me of a really refined take on a BBQ sauce (if BBQ sauce ever involved pomegranates).  Duck is fatty enough and flavorful enough in its own right to work well with fairly aggressive sauces and seasonings, but I was a little worried that this might be taking it a little too far.  But once I tried a mouthful that combined the duck, the sauce and the little pomegranate seeds, I realized that it all came together really well.  The duck is rich, but the sweet, tart flavor of the pomegranate seeds and the slightly sweet, slightly spicy sauce make a really nice dish.  Given that the sauce starts with a caramel, I really expected it to be a little sweeter than it was, but the caramel gave it a nice deep, subtle sweetness to balance out the chiles.  I didn't think it was at all spicy (but if you have a more sensitive palate you might disagree), although the flavors of the chiles and adobo were definitely present.  You might need to modify the cooking times if your duck breasts are particularly large or small, but as written I think the recipe is pretty spot on for normal duck breasts.  This isn't the world's most refined and elevated duck recipe, but it is a very interesting and beautiful one.  Plus the colors were pretty perfect for Christmas if I may say so myself.

Recipe after the jump!

Pan-Roasted Duck Breasts with Butter-Braised Radishes, Kohlrabi and Brussels Sprouts

 

I have been DYING to make this recipe for a very very long time.  I absolutely LOVE so many of the components - duck is one of my very favorite meats, and brussels sprouts are amazing.  As far as I am concerned, radishes and kohlrabi are okay, but I figured if you butter-braised them they would be amazing too.  And my God were they.    But more on that in a bit.  We took a few shortcuts while cooking the veggies because I was way too lazy to use (and then clean) all of those pans.  I think the recipe as written called for two separate pots of boiling salted water and two saute pans.  And that was just for the veggies.  The duck recipe called for a pan, a bowl, a baking sheet and a cooking rack to go on top of the baking sheet.  If we had used all of the pans Thomas Keller wanted, they would have taken over our entire kitchen.  Actually, I'm not even sure we have that many pans and pots.  And we certainly don't have space on our stove top for that many.  Thomas Keller's recipes are flawless, but they are far from simple.  Believe it or not, this was one of the less labor-intensive recipes.

I am obsessed with this dish.  It never ever would have occurred to me to butter braise radishes and serve it with kohlrabi and brussels sprouts.  I was worried that the kohlrabi and the brussels sprouts would be soggy and flavorless since they were blanched without any seasoning, but they were totally delicious.  And the duck was so good.  The skin was perfectly rendered and the meat was tender and juicy.  We have never rendered the fat out this low and slow before throwing the duck in the oven, but the cooking method worked really well.  The meat was perfectly cooked.  The recipe called for orange zest to be grated over the duck while it marinated, but we didn't have any oranges in the apartment so we just skipped that step.  The next time we make the duck (and there will be a next time), I'll make sure to pic up some oranges so I can see how that affects the flavor.  This was a great hearty and rich winter meal with enough butter to make it feel decadent, but enough veggies to make the dish feel balanced.  I loved it.  Sure it had a ton of steps (and necessitated a lot of clean up), but I thought the end result was well worth it.  Once again, Thomas Keller has proved that he is an absolute genius and I am just a baby in comparison.  And once again I am reminded that we really need to make more recipes from this cookbook ASAP.

Recipes after the jump!

Stir-Fried Thai Rice Flake Noodles with Duck

Sometimes after I have a particularly delicious meal I start thinking about how I could make it at home, or at least incorporate some of the flavor profiles and combinations of ingredients into what I make at home.  Some dishes I take one bite of and know that they are so far out of my league that it's not even worth trying.  That happens a lot in NYC because we run into all sorts of situations where there are ingredients I just know we can't find, or we don't have an immersion circulator or any of the other tools necessary to test out some of the more molecular gastronomy-influenced dishes at home.  This dish from Thai Market (they called it Kui Teiw Kua Ped) was one that I knew I couldn't replicate exactly at home because I just don't have that much experience with Thai cuisine and this was a Thai dish that I had never tasted or seen before (or since for that matter).  So how do you replicate that?  All I knew was that the dish had flat rice noodles, shredded piece sof duck, egg, beansprouts, red onion, and scallions.  I want to say that there were some other greens mixed in, but I could be remembering incorrectly.  The sauce was savory and a little on the sweet side, with just a hint of spice.  And they served the noodles with either a lime or lemon wedge for some brightness.

So I picked up some Thai rice flake noodles from Bangkok Center Grocery, some Chinese flowering chives from Hong Kong Supermarket, defrosted some duck breasts, and tried to make a variation on the Thai Market noodles.  So no, these noodles weren't exactly like the ones at Thai Market, but they were a pretty good variation thereon.  Alex and I both really liked them.  They had a surprising amount of peanut flavor given that about 1/2 cup of chopped peanuts were added in at the very end and there were no other peanut or nut components to the dish.  I thought that the balance of ingredients to noodles was perfect - each bite had some noodles and then some veggies or egg or duck.  I hate it when you go to a Thai restaurant and order pad thai and you end up with a plate full of noodles, a little egg, 3-4 shrimp on top and that's it.  I like my stir-fries to be more substantial and varied than that.  Here we succeeded perfectly.  I might play around with the marinade and sauce ingredients a bit, just to see what happens, and try out normal rice noodles instead of rice flakes, but I think that this basic recipe was really good.  So I can consider this attempt at replicating a dish at home a success.

Recipe after the jump!

Teochew Braised Duck and Coconut Basmati Pilaf

I originally planned on making this braised duck recipe as part of my Chinese New Year series of meals.  But I never got around to it.  Earlier this week I went by Fairway and picked up a duck and it occurred to me that we had all of the ingredients we needed to make the duck.  And even though we already finished our seven meals for Chinese New Year there was no reason not to make the duck.

I really like this duck, but there are two things I wish we had done.  First, I wish that after we finished braising the duck (and cooling it in the braising liquid), that we had seared it quickly in a screaming hot pan to crisp up the skin over the breasts a little.  Second, instead of making the chili-lime dipping sauce I would have made a simple Vietnamese salt, pepper and lime dipping sauce (made by combining kosher salt, ground white pepper and a healthy squirt of lime juice).  In Vietnamese restaurants the sauce is usually served alongside dishes like Bo Luc Lac (Shaking Beef), butter-fried frog legs, and roast quail.  I thought that the chili-lime dipping sauce here was a little one note and harsh and didn't complement the duck as well as the salt, pepper and lime dipping sauce would have.  The duck was slightly sweet, moist and very flavorful, if a little on the greasy side.  Granted it is duck, so it should be a bit on the greasy side.  You wouldn't believe how much duck fat rendered out during the braising process.  It was unbelievable.  As for the coconut rice, it was nice.  I might add a little more cardamom and ginger next time - particularly the ginger because neither Alex nor I tasted it at all.  I would also add a little more salt and 1 tsp of sugar to the rice, just to give it a hint of sweetness.

Recipes after the jump!

Cassoulet

So I have to preface this recipe with  an admission.  This isn't real cassoulet.  Or at least it isn't traditional French cassoulet (a thick bean stew/casserole containing pork sausages, other cuts of pork, duck and white beans).  Or at least this isn't that similar to the French cassoulet that my host family used to make for me when I lived in France.  This is my version of cassoulet, based on whatever we had in the fridge and/or the pantry, which in this case was 2 legs of duck confit, 4 pork sausages of some sort (we got a Grilling Spectacular package from Dickson's Farmstand a few months ago, which contained 3 different varieties of pork sausage, none of which were labeled), and one lb. of dried white coco beans (which it turns out are traditionally used in cassoulet).  We also threw in some onions, carrots, fresh herbs, red wine, San Marzano tomatoes, and then topped the whole mess with panko bread crumbs.  I really wanted to add some fresh parsley, but unfortunately we were all out.

So this recipe might not be your traditional cassoulet, but it was close enough.  And it was yummy.  This is the type of warm, filling, and comforting dish that would be perfect after a long day of skiing or any other cold weather activity.  Alex and I both gave it a solid B, even though it was more suitable for 40 degree weather than the current temps in the mid-60s.  I really wish that we had some fresh parsley to mix in with the breadcrumbs to lighten things up a touch, and I also wish that the breadcrumbs had formed a better crust on top.  Otherwise, I thought it was a fairly lovely and hearty dish.

Recipe after the jump!

Red Curry Duck

There are a few things that I consistently order at Thai restaurants - tom kha gai soup, tom yum soup, soft shell crab, and duck in red curry.  I love a nice piece of duck in a nice spicy, yet somewhat sweet curry.  I try to mix it up sometimes, but those are my favorites that I return to time and time again.  Even though I have a serious thing for duck in all of its many forms (Peking duck, Cantonese roast duck, crispy duck, five-spice duck, etc), I rarely cook it at home.  I'm not really sure why that is, because duck is fairly easily available in NYC, but somehow it rarely makes it into my shopping cart.  I really need to fix that.  I also need to make more curries at home, so when the idea struck me to make duck I figured why not go for a Thai curry and kill two birds with one stone.  The recipe for Red Curry Duck is one of the least complicated recipes in my Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges cookbook, but I still had to modify it a lot.  I wasn't about to start pureeing red Thai chilis and fresh pineapple.  As much as I love this cookbook, it really is meant for the restaurant chef and not the home cook.  So I tend to steal ideas and flavor profiles from it, but not cook entire recipes.  This is as close as I have ever come to actually following a Jean-Georges recipe and I'm still not that close at all.

My favorite thing about this curry was the bright sweetness of the chunks of pineapple.  The curry itself had a nice flavor, with a nice lingering spiciness to it, although our Thai chilis weren't as hot as I had expected them to be.  I could have done without the carrots, but that is a personal thing since I'm just not a huge fan of cooked carrots.  All things considered, they didn't hurt or help the dish.  The duck itself was fine, although it would have been a little better if it had a little more flavor to it.  Next time we might try this recipe with duck legs so we can simmer them longer in the curry without overcooking them.  Or perhaps we will create more of a spice rub on the duck breasts.  Since this is the first time we have ever tried this recipe, or any variation on it, we will have to tweak it a bit in the coming year to perfect it.  But this was a very good start.

Recipe after the jump!