Duck! Duck!

On a day when some friends and my parents came to visit (6 adults in all), I decided to make some roast/bbq duck. Why the mixed recipe, you ask? why, it's so that you can have the best of both worlds: the tenderizing and degreasing effect of baking, and the crispy and smoky effect of grilling.

My butcher advised me to get two smaller female ducks (canette) rather than one big male one (canard), seeing how the males tend to be more fat. He went to his neighbor's yard and picked a couple out for me. 

I stuffed them in the over with some herbs in their cavities. I cooked them long and slow (about 2 hours at 170C= 335F), just to get the inside nice and tender. Duck can be chewy and tough if it's not cooked completely through. Fast cooking is something that works well with duck breast (I'll do a post about that, it's one of my wife's favorites), but it's better, in my opinion to cook a whole duck through completely.

After the birds had been in the oven for roughly 2 hours, I attempted to split them in half, thinking it'd be nice to have 4 half birds on the grill. I obviously needed a bigger knife, despite my knife being quite large, thank you very much (you can se it on the right side of the photo). I decided to abort the procedure before destroying my knife or making a mess. Sometimes cooking is about knowing when to say enough is enough.

 Once outside, I basted the ducks in my homemade thyme/rosemary syrup. It worked really well.

On the grill, the birds got nice and crispy, though I think they could have been baked a little longer in preparation.

And they got smoked as well! 

 After taking them off the heat, it's best, as with red meat, to let duck rest under aluminum foil. Of course, you want to actually cover them so that they don't get cold.

After 10 minutes' rest, during which the fibers retighten to prevent the juices from running out of cooking, you can carve the birds. Notice the super-cool circa 1975 platter underneath - it's been in my family since I was born, a true heirloom!

All right, that's all very well, but what to serve with the duck? I made a veggies stew with the following ingredients. Here I made a mistake. I intended to cook everything but the beans (fresh, shucked that morning) for a while and then add the beans. However, this meant cooking the cabbage, turnips, and carrots in too much water, preventing them from getting nice and crispy/caramelized with the onions.

In a future attempt, I will cook the beans separately and mix everything together at the end. Don't forget to put a bit of pork belly and herbs with the veggies, to give the sauce flavor.

For those without a grill, you can achieve the 'grill effect' by raising the temperature your oven to the maximum either at the start or the end of the cooking. Personally, I prefer to do it at the end, when the skin is pearled with greasy drops that will participate in the grilling process. No need to use the broiler unless your oven can't get hot enough.

Fish is meat

I know this has been mostly about meat, but I spent a good amount of time cooking fish during the summer. Technically, fish is meat, so I guess I'm not too far afield.

On these two photos, you can see what happens when you cook a fish on coals. As an aside, I filled the fish cavity with herbs and a couple of slices of lemon. The difficult part is to ensure that the fish isn't overcooked, and also that it doesn't disintegrate when it gets flipped. 

The trick that I learned is to let it grill significantly, until it gets nice and charred, and then flip it. 

On this one, you can see that I left a little too long. It turned out good enough to eat (frankly quite good), but it could probably have been flipped a little sooner. I didn't cook it quite as long on the other side.

You can do the same thing with any whole fish, fresh or saltwater.

Summer grilling

This summer, I had a grill, and seafood, and time.

I went to the market and bought some calamari and cuttlefish fished the night before. The calamari was so fresh that it was slightly transluscent. I decided to make ceviche with it, which is to say that I winged a marinade with some lemon, lime, and orange juice, garlic, shallot, herbs, and coriander. I added a touch of sugar to correct for acidity. It was delicious, if a bit goopy.

I then used the same marinade for the cuttlefish, priori to grilling.

I beheaded and gutted some sardines, which come fresh from local Breton waters.

 On some hot coals, I layed out my cuttlefish.

It really doesn't need to cook at all, so you can cook it as little as you want. Personally I like to see some caramelizing of the marinade, but be sure not to overcook, as it gets chewy.

Sardines on a grill.

The trick I learned recently is to way until they no longer stick to the grate to flip them.

All served for a nice and simple lunch with tomatoes and a few pan-fried vegetables.

Grilled pig ear (BBQ) - and a côte de boeuf

On a recent (and one would say rare) sunny day in Paris, I headed over to a cousin's house to prepare a BBQ. I had decided to make 'côte de boeuf' and pig ear. The beef piece is out of the rib but without bone - though you can buy it with bone as well. In France, it is considered to be the most noble piece of the beef and was a bit of a splurge.

The pig ear, on the other hand, cost less than 2 euros. I boiled it for an hour before letting it cool and marinating it in a mixture of soy sauce, ketchup, and olive oil. Once it had been sitting in the marinade for about 30 minutes, I threw it on the grill until it was nice and grilled all over. 

The rule here is that you can't overcook a piece of cartilage. The longer it's cooked (boiled+grilled), the more tender it will be. In the end, it's crunchy and chewy at the same time, and quite fatty to boot. Delicious, in other words.

The idea of making this came after I made twice-cooked pork for my parents a few weeks earlier. I used pork belly (poitrine). After boiling the the meat for an hour with some star anise, I let it cool overnight and sliced it thinly. I then grilled it in a wok, set it aside, and made stir-fried vegetables to serve with it. It was amazing.

I don't have anything good to report about the beef, which I sadly overcooked. Here's a photo that shows just how nice a piece of meat it was: you can tell from the marbling and the nice color. The butcher also removed a nice layer of fat from the outside, which, along with the marbling, is a good sign that the cow's been outside, eating grass and getting cold - instead of inside, eating god-only-knows-what.