Finding an adventurous taster is sometimes a daunting task. Food allergies, dietary restrictions, picky eaters, and uneducated pallets, all things you have to contend with when trying to find someone to give you a cage match brutal review of some dish you sent hours fussing over. I'm lucky... I found at least one taster that doesn't twitch at words like kidney, liver or gizzard. Willing to submit to my attempts at culinary voodoo. She said "My heart is breaking over how salty this is... you worked so hard." and indeed I had but I wouldn't have been happy if she had smiled at me and lied "It's wonderful...". Especially since I was eating the same chokingly salty prep of duck confit.
Yes folks, my Duck Confit was for the most part a failure. I say most part because buried deep in the heart of the thigh meat was a nugget of meat that was not like a salt lick. That one bite for me made up for the rest of the duck. It gave me a hint of what duck confit could be. Just salty enough, perfumed with the bay leaf, garlic, and cloves, melt in your mouth tender, lick you fingers good. Hell, lick your entire hand good.
If you read the two previous post in this series, Day 1-2, Day 3-4, you are aware of the time it takes to prep this dish. The final plating is done by crisping up the skin either on the stove top or in an oven.
My lovely taster granted me the use of her oven, broiler cranked up on high. I set the tray as high as it would go, and let the oven get rippin hot. While the oven was preheating I helped finish a mango, arugula salad. I also dropped two orders of Lemon Asparagus.(first posted here).
After a few minutes of preheating, the oven was ready and in went the duck. A few minutes later, as I was trimming the flesh from a ripe mango, for the salad, I caught a flash of light out of the corner of my eye.... What? Fire? Yep. Shit... The duck fat was kicking up and splattering on the broiler elements and creating quick little flashes of orange light as it incinerated into duck smoke. (Which actually smelled quite nice).
I moved the oven rack down a level, killed the power and left the duck to finish cooking in the cooling oven, while the salad and asparagus finished. My host turned on the commercial kitchen sized vent hood on, and sucked out the smoke in a matter of a couple minutes.
I imagine if you could seal off the kitchen entrances (3 of them), you could probably use the vent to create a NASA vacuum chamber for space suit testing... I am so jealous.
We plated the duck on the asparagus with the salad on the side. It was very pretty.
Let me just warn you... If you cook duck in this manner and want to make pron with it, you better do it quick. The duck is all moist and glistening right out of the oven, but within a couple of minutes, it goes a little dull, not so shiny. This in no way affects the flavor. I have a feeling that those pictures of in foodie magazines are primped and spritzed and mostly cold when the shutter was clicked. I would also like to say that the preceding paragraph is not in any way an indictment of my host taster's photography skills, just a warning... Take pictures of duck quick as you can.
The Lemon Asparagus got thumbs up and the duck thumbs down from my volunteer taster. The salad was killer but I can't claim that one even though I helped
Even thought it was a failure this time, I will be trying the confit again. I learned a lot as I usually do when trying something like this, and I still have 2 breast to turn into duck rillettes.
I recommend trying your hand at duck confit, but then again I recommend trying all the recipes I post.
Cheers
Chris
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