Duck, duck, duck fat.

Saturday was the last relaxing day I would have for a while (I have to drive to Ohio with the kids by myself next week -- long story), and while I was out running errands I semi-impulsively decided that what I really needed was a lengthy, satisfying cooking project.

There's something I love about spending a few hours in the kitchen and emerging with something tangible, like a big pot of complicated beef bourguignon or a stack of casseroles in the freezer for an upcoming busy time.  I don't really enjoy baking very much, but those of you who do may recognize the same satisfaction in getting all the Christmas cookies made and frozen, or making an extra-fancy birthday cake for someone special.  I suppose it's not very different from the pleasure of having all the tomatoes canned and cooling in rows of jars on the counter, except that I don't can, either.  

Anyway, while I was out I stopped into a grocery store to get an ingredient I needed for Monday's dinner at H.'s (my turn to bring my crockpot), and in the store I impulsively bought two large frozen ducks.

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I do not buy duck often.  I will order it in a better restaurant if duck breast (or even better, magret de canard) is on the menu -- I've never been disappointed in it, because I guess restaurants don't tend to put it on the menu if they can't do it right -- but it's been maybe five years since I bought duck at the store.  

Part of the reason is that the price tag is pretty alarming.   My six-and-a-half pound ducks each cost more than twenty dollars at my ordinary grocery store.  (I would have bought smaller ones if there had been any).  Like I said, it was kind of an impulse buy.   It's probably a better idea to shop around, or look for a sale around the holidays (I guess -- I know when turkeys and corned beef briskets go on sale, but I'm not sure if duck has a sale season).  Googling around, I see that Aldi stores in the US carry duck for about a dollar less per pound than at my Cub.  Oops, I'll go there next time.  Googling also indicated that I might find a decent price at an Asian market, which I might have to check the next time I need to stock up on fish sauce.  If you have a farmer's market or other source for locally raised duck, or you're a hunter, you might do even better.

But I intended to squeeze everything out of the duck but the quack, plus entertain myself for an afternoon, so I hoped it wouldn't be wasted.

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I thawed my ducks in a sink of cold water, and when they were pliable enough I set out some aluminum roasting pans, opened the packages and started cutting.

I've never just done "whole roasted duck," even though a properly done one is beautiful, because I am notoriously bad at whole roasted chickens.  Duck is even more persnickety than chickens because -- well, in my opinion the difficulty with whole chickens is that the breast meat is different from the dark meat and is done at different times, and I don't like hovering over the oven with foil and thermometers; and duck has even MORE discrepancy between the legs and the breast.  The legs are really full of connective tissue and behave better when braised, while the breast roasts nicely.  So I always cut the damn thing up.

And that's why I always buy two:  because I need to feed the family on the duck breast alone.  

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I performed an advanced separations technique ("cutting the damn thing up") for a while.  I am used to cutting up a chicken to roast the parts on the bone, but the duck separation has a somewhat different purpose.  What I was after was this:

• one pan with the four duck breast fillets, skin-on, but cut off the bone
• one pan with as much of the rest of the skin and fat as I could remove from the duck carcass
• two pans each holding the remainder of the duck carcasses, most of the dark meat attached
• the internal organs of the ducks, which I was going to toss because, sadly, I hate organ meat, even at $3.59 a pound sunk cost

This took a couple of knives and a sturdy pair of kitchen scissors, and a lot of paper towels, as well as about six feet of my kitchen counter and both sinks, and a good deal of time.  Maybe an hour.

(Where were the kids during all this?  With Mark, mostly, or watching movies.  You don't want to cut up two ducks unless you're sure that all small children are being adequately cared for for the duration.)

I set my bowl of skin and fat aside, and I set my ragged-looking carcasses-trimmed-of-skin-and-fat aside, washed my hands real good, and proceeded to make dinner out of my four duck breast fillets.  They were big enough to feed my family of six, considering that we generally eschew Everybody Gets Their Own Hunk of Meat dinners.

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Four-duck-breast dinner:

• Put a rice cooker on with rice.  For a special treat for the kids, we used WHITE RICE.  They were ecstatic.
• Wash up some kale and wilt it with garlic and oil, then add some liquid and let it braise on low.
• Wash some fresh fruit for the kids.  We had grapes.
• Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.  Score the skin on the duck breasts in a diamond pattern.  Season with salt and pepper.  Preheat two heavy skillets over medium heat -- dry -- cast iron is perfect for this, but I only have one and my good big heavy skillet worked fine -- and place the duck breasts skin side down in the hot pans.  Let 'em cook until the skin is crisp and the fat rendered out.  I think mine took about 12 or 15 minutes, but you have to keep checking.  You do want them to be good and crispy, so that the skin looks DONE.  Otherwise they'll spend too much time in the oven crisping up.
• Meanwhile, whisk about 2/3 of a cup of plum preserves (I used my mother-in-law's preserves made from home-grown plums -- truly worthy of glazing a duck breast) with a tablespoon or two of soy sauce and some red pepper flakes.  Five-spice powder would be nice if you had it (I couldn't find mine).  I believe that apricot or cherry preserves would also be very nice, maybe even blackberry.
• Turn the duck over in the skillet and carefully spoon off as much of the fat as you can.  DO NOT THROW THIS FAT AWAY.  Save it in a glass container and set it aside for Phase 3 of Operation Get Your Money's Worth Out of These Ducks.
• Brush all the preserves mixture over the duck breasts.  Transfer the skillet to the oven and roast.  I believe the internal temperature you are going for is 135 degrees F, if you like them on the rare side, but even if they get a little overdone (mine ALWAYS do -- roasting birds is just not my strong point) they will still taste great.  Duck breasts just don't dry out the way a chicken breast will.  Anyway, it will not take long to finish them in the oven.  Five to eight minutes and you absolutely should be checking.
• Transfer to a cutting board and let the duck rest a few minutes while you spoon off the pan juices.
• Slice the duck thinly -- quarter inch slices -- keeping that little sliver of crispy skin on each, for which you will need your knife to be quite sharp.  Arrange the slices on a platter and pour that deep purple-brown, plummy sauce all over.  Toss a handful of sliced scallions on top and serve it with the aforementioned rice and greens.  
• If you have a Trappist dubbel ale to go with it, SO MUCH THE BETTER.   I did!  

My six-year-old daughter begged, "Make this every week!"  I said, "um, no."  But maybe next week I will make the rest of the package of white rice, and she will be just as happy.

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It turned out that we only ate three of the four duck breast fillets.  I had one left over! You know what that meant?  Duck fried rice a couple of days later.  File that away in the "awesome leftovers" category.

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After the meal was done and the ale bottle was empty, I had to head back into the kitchen to deal with the bowl of fat and the carcasses.  I thought maybe I might stick them back in the fridge and finish the next day, but the night was still young and Mark had offered to do the dishes, so I decided to get it over with.

I put the carcasses in their pans in the oven, there to roast until the meat was all cooked through.  Here is where a little patience might have been better:  I think I would have gotten more meat off of them if I had roasted the duck more slowly at a lower temperature, to encourage some of that abundant connective tissue to let go.  Live and learn.  

Eventually I would pull the carcasses out and pick them as cleanly as I could of meat from the legs, thigh, wings, and back.  This was harder than I remembered it, probably because I had roasted them too quickly.  But I managed to get quite a lot of meat shreds off the ducks, certainly enough for a casserole, maybe two if I stretched it.  This went well-wrapped into the freezer.  It is, I think, destined for enchiladas, which are easy and very tasty with duck -- green enchiladas, maybe, or picadillo.  Or possibly I will combine some with white beans and sage for a Tuscan-inspired sort of dish.  We shall see.

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After the carcasses are picked, of course, they are not done.  I cracked them into pieces and distributed the bones among several freezer bags labeled "Duck Carcass For Stock."  I think I can get three or maybe four pots of stock out of the two ducks, or if I like I can add a wing here and a leg there to my chicken stock to make it richer, darker, and more gelatinous.

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While the carcasses were safely in the oven, I turned my attention to the bowl full of fat and skin scraps.  I cut the chunks up into inch-size pieces and put them all in a large saucepan with a cup or so of water, then set them to boil.  The water keeps the temperature low until it all boils away, giving the fat time to render; once the added water's gone it still bubbles for a while, I guess as moisture comes out of the duck skin.   You have to stir it from time to time to keep it from sticking to the bottom, and as the water leaves you have to pay closer attention, because you don't want it to burn.  

The skin of the duck, near the end, starts to brown and crisp, and turn into what looks a lot like pork rinds but is actually duck rinds.  Duck cracklings!  I had a paper-towel-lined plate and a slottted spoon handy, and as these started to turn brown and crispy I started carefully removing them.  Let as much duck fat as possible drip back into the pan; anything that soaks into the paper towels is wasted.  (Now that I think about it, it might be better to drain your cracklings on a rack set over a bowl.  I went for the paper towels because that's what I do when I make tortilla chips.  Duh.)

Once all the cracklings are spooned out of the pot and the heat is turned off, take that pot of duck fat and pour it through a cheesecloth-lined strainer into a measuring cup.  Admire your work:

 There's probably more duck fat lying around the kitchen:  in the bottoms of the roasting pans with the carcasses, in a bowl with a spoon in it next to the stove where you spooned the fat off the pan from searing the duck breasts.  You can expect to get at least a cup of fat out of each duck, if you did a good job carefully saving the fat as you go along.  With two ducks, you can think of this as the equivalent of a pound of expensive butter.  Nothing, nothing, is better for frying potatoes, and I'm told that it is also a nice fat to use for a savory pastry.  Mine pretty much all goes into fried potatoes over the following weeks.  

I gave a cup of it to H., though, as a present.  She received it with great joy.

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 So out of my two ducks, here is what I got:

• Meat for one really fancy family meal (the pan-roasted plum-glazed duck breast)
• Meat for three less-fancy, but still pretty special, family meals (let's say two pans of enchiladas and a batch of duck fried rice)
• Three or four pots of duck stock, or alternatively an enhancement for 6-8 pots of chicken stock
• Almost a pound of premium cooking fat
• DUCK CRACKLINGS which theoretically keep in your fridge for a while and are a wonderful thing to sprinkle on top of a salad, unless you eat them all with a nice hoppy IPA the next day as a bedtime snack
• An evening's entertainment, if you like cutting up poultry

Let's deconstruct this, shall we?

7 ounces of *rendered* duck fat = $10, so my pound of duck fat is worth more than twenty dollars on its own -- there, I already paid for one duck.  

A boneless duck breast fillet can cost you at least $11 -- Looky there, I had four!  Call it $40.

A quart of prepared duck stock (or concentrate to make a quart) would cost you $6.  I expect about eight quarts of stock out of this.

Fully cooked pulled duck leg meat is about $7/lb.  I guess I got maybe a pound out of it.

So for my $45 and one evening's investment, I estimate I produced a retail value of $100.  It's still not cheap -- I mean, you could eat chicken breast and make chicken stock and chicken enchiladas (don't bother with the fat, though) and save your money -- definitely a premium foody experience, akin to eating in a restaurant.

But even though it's not cheap, it's frugal.  Very little is wasted (especially if you can find something to do with the organ meats, and you don't lose some of that fat in paper towels.)

I'm not sure, but I think I even tasted some of the quack.

Comments

[MrsDarwin]

Mm, sounds delicious. Since I don't have the time do anything like this anytime in the next month, the next best thing is to read about it.

[Tabitha]

Love this! Thanks for describing the whole process. I have a duck in the freezer. I should buy another and do something similar.

[Rebekka]

I love duck. We just had one for ... St. Martin's Eve? (What do you call that in English?) It was a potluck and they rotisseried the whole duck on their gas grill. Holy moly, it was good. None of us were fans of organ meat and other gross stuff (ie, what we think was a trachea), so we simmered that while the duck roasted, then used the resulting stock to make gravy. Then we didn't have to feel bad about throwing the organs away.

[rachel]

For next time: try Amanda Hesser's recipe (first simmer with sherry, ginger, soy and celery, netting you loads of lovely stock and easily-collected fat; then roast briefly). Perfect and easy.