Morning Open Thread - Culinary draft

Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT) We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 7:00 am Eastern (and perhaps sometimes earlier!). Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the Auto Publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometimes the diarist du jour shows up much later: that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Volunteer in the comment threads. Click on the MOT - Morning Open Thread ♥ if you'd like us to show up in your stream. Well it seems a couple of days ago I got drafted by Joy of Fishes and others to write a cooking diary every so often, and whereas I wanted to complete my coal story the weather is still totally shitty with rain, rain, rain and for a change more rain, so no photos.

So, picking up on a thread a few weeks ago, I thought we could talk about Duck.

(In an aside which is totally irrelevant to this diary, I used to work in the Middle East and had contacts with Qataris, who are the most arrogant, impolite people you will ever meet. The capital of Qatar is Doha, which I renamed Ducking Foha)

So back to Ducks. I used to have a second home in the Perigord, which is the world capital of Foie Gras production. Now the livers would sell for a high price, which meant the rest of the duck was pretty cheap. So locally you could get Magret (breast) or Confit (legs preserved in fat) or just the fat at very reasonable prices.

The trick with duck is it is very fatty, so cooking it means that you want to keep it moist, but to cook away the excess fat (which should be kept for roasting potatoes). You can do this on a barbeque, but beware of frequent flame outs, or in a an oven by raising the duck onto a mesh grill in the pan.

Now duck, like most game, goes well with fruit. The most famous is Duck a L'Orange, which I have only successfully managed a couple of times, but cranberry sauce, even apple or pear will work well. Mostly the French just use Herbes de provence, which is a more savory, less sweet option.

Now, a first step is to learn how to roast a duck (it is a similar process for a goose - which just takes more time), and I always found it difficult because it was either too dry, or too greasy. But one day, I came across this video on the intertoobz, tried it a couple of days later, and it really works.

So here you go. .

By the way their website has some wonderful recipes, including Chinese crispy duck with pancakes.

Update  11.00 est. well it was abit of a lazy diary, but it has generated some lively discussion on cooking practices. Thanks all for your inputs.