During a three-way phone conversation on Christmas Day, my youngest brother and I somehow slid, the way we always do in any family phone conversation, to talk about food—what we’ve eaten, what we want to eat, what we’re going to eat. My vegetarian English husband always marvels at how my family can talk about the next meal during the one in front of them, which mildly astonishes us, in my natal family: what else would you find a riveting subject, of interest to all the different political and religious beliefs around the table? Anyway, first my brother David told me about how he had experimented with my Aunt Celia’s heritage green Jell-O and cream cheese molded dish by adding horseradish. “It was a triumph,” he said modestly. And then, even more modestly, “Although I cannot say that it was relished by those at the table.” We both had a laugh about that. Of course he asked what I was making for Christmas dinner. We’d had our traditional Christmas Eve paella the night before, and I had described this already. My husband was hanging in there gamely—he does really like my family, and he has a code of honor when it comes to associating with them, i.e. he does it with apparent good will, even when he has to listen endlessly to the topic of food. But when it came to my description of the duck I was going to roast for myself—scalloped oysters for him, lucky pup—he threw in the towel.
Me: I found this new way of cooking duck…
David: Oh, you have to tell me how it works out, I’m always looking for a good way to cook duck.
Me: Me, too. I haven’t found the perfect way just yet, but I have hopes about this one…
David: I’ve tried steaming them first…
Me: I wondered about that, how was it?
David: So-so. Skin not so crispy.
Me: It seems like it would waste all that wonderful fat. Best part. Cooked later with potatoes. Yum.
At this point my poor vegetarian husband gave up. He wished David a Merry Christmas and hung up, presumably to contemplate the idea of the pickled beets I’d made for Boxing Day.
David and I continued.
Me: I’ve tried wet brining them, you know, with the garlic and bay leaf brine I use for roast chicken, but that didn’t work, it just masked the ducky flavor…
David: Mmmm Hmmm. That wouldn’t be good.
Me: So I’m going to try just a dry brine of salt, a little sugar, some baking soda to tighten the skin…
David: Definitely. That’ll work. We did that for the turkey at Thanksgiving.
Me: Then this recipe has it heated to 450 for about ten minutes, then 250 for five hours. The idea is to shred the meat at the end to use in tortillas, but I’m thinking that’s what I’ll do with the leftovers, you know, hoisin sauce on a whole wheat tortilla…
David: Yeah, of course. Shredded green onions, chopped cilantro…
Me: Naturally. But why do I want shredded duck meat when I can just get a great piece of duck with crispy skin right out of the oven…
David: Why indeed?
Me: Maybe next time I’ll reverse engineer it, cook it at 250 for hours, then raise the heat to crisp the skin…
David: That’s the way they say is best to do it.
Me: Seriously? Does it render the fat well?
David: Yeah. Perfect.
Me: Man, where have I been? All these years of roasting it at high temperature, and my hair smelling of duck fat all night…
David: You should have asked me!
Me: I will next time.
David: But let me know how this one works. I think you’re on to something here.
And then we wished each other compliments of the season, and I hung up to put the duck in the oven for the afternoon.
It turned out to be the best way to cook duck. Perfectly rendered fat with no burning or smelling up the kitchen. Perfectly crisped skin—except on the bottom, since I really have got to get it together to buy a real roasting rack to get the bird off the bottom of the pan. But it still tasted great. Of course I did fiddle with the recipe. Of course I did.
Now the recipe had recommended a really highly spiced marinade for what it called ‘Jerk Duck,’ both to marinade the duck in over night, and to flavor it later. This seemed like a case of gilding the lily to me, or in this case, outducking the duck. But I liked the idea that the duck would sssllllooowwwwllly turn a deep mahogany brown. I like the skin the best. Did I mention that? When I cook a duck for myself alone, that skin almost entirely gets coaxed off and put on my immediate plate. Heaven. Why marinade the duck when you can dry brine it and get a crispy skin?
Why indeed?
So here was the way I did it.
Take a frozen duck two days at least before roasting. Defrost in the refrigerator overnight. Two days won’t hurt.
The day before roasting, mix a dry brine in a small bowl. Lots of kosher salt. Do not stint on this; don’t worry, it will all be to the good. I use a whole handful myself. Add a couple of tablespoons of sugar. Don’t fuss about measuring, just eyeball it. Then add a small amount of baking soda, not more than a teaspoon full. This helps dry out the skin of the bird and adds to maximum crisp. There’s some physics reason for this, but don’t worry about that—just go for the crispy skin.
Dry the bird with paper towels as thoroughly as you can. Place it on a platter big enough to hold it comfortably, and rub it all over with the rub. Inside and out. If you run out, add more salt. Don’t worry about the salt. It’ll all just work to tighten and tastify the skin. It won’t be too salty, I swear. Though I imagine if you’ve got health concerns about salt, a whole roast duck is not what you’re aiming to cook anyway.
Put it, uncovered, in the refrigerator for anywhere from an hour to twenty-four hours before you roast it. I do the whole twenty-four myself. That dries out the skin beautifully, though I have to turn it over and dry the bottom (see reminder to myself to buy roasting rack, above).
Then preheat the oven to 450 degrees. At this point, I add other stuff to the oven’s bottom rack, because why have the oven going so long without using the whole damn thing? This particular day I added three huge beets wrapped in foil and placed, for safety, on a little baking dish. Roast beets are the best. Skin rubbed off, sliced, added to onions and pickling vinegar, yum. I also added three Bosc pears in a baking dish, their bottoms a bit scooped out and filled with a tablespoon each of honey. Put upright in the dish, a little water added, a few cloves, and when baked, perfect for breakfast reheated with a little cream.
Then the duck. I scored the skin with a sharp knife—a razor blade would probably be more effective, as well as more precise. I never seem to be able to do that thing they tell you in recipes—”Only score the fat, be careful not to cut down to the meat.” Oh well. The meat bleeds a little, but it still tastes great. It’s all good when it’s duck, is my feeling.
You could prick the duck all over with a fork, which works too, and is probably easier re: not cutting down to the meat action.
I stuck it in a roasting pan atop a jury-rigged rack (I really have to buy a decent rack one of these days), and popped it in the oven. Fifteen minutes later, it was starting to brown, so, as per the recipe, I turned the stove down to 250 and left it to its own devices.
Somewhere around the three-hour mark, the house began to smell delightfully of duck. But not so intrusively as with my usual fire and fury method. Just a gentle reminder of the wonders to come.
By four hours, it was starting to brown. Not enough to my tastes, and not anywhere near the picture that had come with the recipe, so at four and a half hours, when it was still a little paler than I would like, I poured all the fat in the pan out carefully into a glass container so I could see and separate the fat from the meat juice later (fat stays good forever in the fridge is there are no meat juices to go bad along with it, and the meat juices go into the duck soup that I’ll make from the carcass). So I turned the oven up to 400 and cooked it another half hour until it was nice and brown and crispy (and the pears were caramelizing, and I could smell the beets were done). Turning the oven back down to 350 so I could heat up the scalloped oysters for Alex’s dinner, I took the bird out of the oven and let it rest for thirty minutes. (While I waited, I also took out the beets, peeled them, and sliced them into a waiting pickled onion bath, where they would marinade contentedly until called upon for another dinner. But they were so tempting, that I diced a half of one and tossed it into the dinner salad with blue cheese crumbles, all dressed with a little olive oil and lemon.)
At dinner, the oysters were browned and smelled delightfully oysterish. I carved myself a leg and thigh and wing of the bird, and secretly pulled off a lot of extra skin to add to my plate. We each had our own main, with the salad on the side, and since we’d rather filled up with bits of cheese and olives and celery and crackers with some neighbors who came by to share a prepran glass of Christmas cheer, and since there was an amazing selection of gifted sweets for dessert, that was enough.
The duck was perfect. Moist, tender, falling off the bone, skin crisp and crackly as all get out.
And the next day, I had the other leg for lunch. All the bones, meanwhile, going into the pot with a scraped carrot, the leftover celery from the crudité tray, a head of garlic, a bay leaf, some peppercorns, all covered with water, brought to a boil and set on the woodstove.
After that second lunch, I shredded the rest of the meat into a bowl, and tossed the bones into the broth.
So for lunch today, I had the meat, as suggested in the original recipe, atop a heated whole-wheat tortilla spread with hoisin sauce and shredded scallion, some shredded cabbage, and topped with some chopped cilantro. It all seemed a bit dry, so I ladled a tablespoon of the broth cooking on the woodstove atop it all. Heaven.
And tonight, we’ll have onion soup made with the duck broth. My vegetarian husband isn’t a fanatic, after all, especially when it comes to deep flavored soup broth, and as long as he doesn’t have to listen to me blather about duck fat.
It’s all good. And in this case, this way of cooking duck is the best I’ve yet to find. Which was a Christmas present of the nicest kind.
Happy New Year, All. And many, many good things to eat.