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.

Adventures with twice-cooked pork

In some Chinese cooking recipes for pork, you're to cook it twice. Once boiled (or some other slow-cooking method) and once grilled. I am not sure about the science behind this, but the taste is really good.

I tried this with pig ears in June, and I'd tried it with some fatback in my wok. This summer, I had access to a barbecue, and so I decided to give it a go with some spare ribs. My butcher likes to cut his spare ribs thick as a brick, including a few healthy layers of meat and fat on top.

To make this, I decided to boil the meat with some random herbs (random because you could use any herbs, really): thyme, laurel, and rosemary, together with some pepper and coriander. Once the meat had been in boiling broth for about 1.5 hours, I took it out, let it cool for a few hours - because I had a few hours, but cool is cool enough - and broiled it on the grill.

While broiling, I covered it with some thyme syrup that I'd made by making thyme tea and adding lots of brown sugar over heat.

I served with home-made chips and grilled eggplant. It was as good as it looks.