This dish was inspired by me craving my mom's ham steak. She would put a ham steak in a baking pan along with the juices from the package, rub in some brown sugar, top with a couple pats of butter, then broil. Once done, she'd reduce the juices to thicken it to a nice sauce. That flavor inspired me. So I brought in a meyer lemon puree to balance out the sweetness of the brown sugar glaze, and a red onion confit to bump up the earthy, savory qualities while also functioning as a different kind of sweetness. The dish comprised:
- Sous vide duck breast
- Duck cracklin
- Meyer lemon puree
- Brown sugar glaze
- Red onion confit
- Mustard flowers (they don't taste of mustard)
This post represents the shortest time from dinner to press in the history of EatFoo. This was tonight's dinner. And not only was it tonight's dinner, it was a late dinner. I didn't get home until around 8:15pm (yay law), and we didn't eat until about 9:30pm. I temporarily placated Jeanette's and my hungry bellies with some quick garlic bread, and then set about making this dish, which took a little under an hour to pull together.
Yesterday a friend told me, after looking at this blog, that he was surprised that I do this kind of cooking so often despite holding down a fairly time-consuming job. And well, it's not all roses, and the posts here gushing about how delicious something was sometimes hide the really crappy aspects of this hobby:
Sometimes dinner is late. Sometimes I have something awesome planned, only to have to repurpose my ingredients toward something that can be made in twenty minutes. Sometimes I give Jeanette a hot dish and resign myself to eating a cold one so that I can spend five minutes photographing it for the blog. Sometimes I buy great ingredients and then am forced to let them spoil and be thrown away because something critical comes up at work that slams me for a couple days. And one thing that I can't do anymore is that I can't stay up late night after night trying shit just for the hell of it. These days, if I'm putting my time into making something, we're damn well eating it for dinner. So it better be good. And when it's not, it makes it that much more disappointing.
On that note, I'm going to lead with the best thing about this dish: it looks great. The second best thing about this dish was the concept. It was a solid idea, and I would revisit it in a second. In a distant third place came the taste. It was good, but not great. In addition to encountering hitches outside my control, I also just plain screwed up some of the execution. That isn't to say anything went horribly wrong. It didn't. All the components were delicious individually. It was seasoned well. The duck was tender. There were just a number of imperfections that nag me.
After the jump: how I made this, and the problems it had...
Ugly duckling.
Let me begin with the one hitch I had nothing to do with. I was going to make this last night, but the duck breasts I'd bought from Avedano's were rotten. I am a big fan of Avedano's, and I buy from them frequently. But I bought the breasts on Monday night, and they went directly from their fridge to mine, with only about fifteen minutes commute in between. They stayed in my fridge for under 24 hours, and when I pulled them out, they were very stinky, and brown. The picture to the right of this paragraph is not what raw duck should look like. If your raw duck looks like this, do not feed it to your cat even if she whines a lot for it. However, if she whines a whole lot, and you would prefer never to deal with her whining ever again, then definitely feed it to her. Otherwise, simply discard.
Duck should be red in color, and can vary from a grayish red to almost pink. Brown is right out. So hitch #1 was that I'd bought these beautiful mustard flowers from the farmer's market Tuesday and couldn't use them at their peak. Everything else was easily reserved for today with no loss in quality. I went back to Avedano's, and they were happy to replace the breasts, without giving me any attitude or probing questions that presume I'm an idiot. The breasts I got today were beautiful.
Hitch #2 was that I didn't have time to set up my immersion circulator (oh yeah, I have one of those now--I will post about it next), so I tried to rely on the imprecise stovetop method. However, I was too hectic trying to get other shit done, and I let the duck get a bit overcooked. I was going for 140F for 30 minutes. At its highest point, the water bath got up to 150. As soon as I read the temperature and saw that, I yanked the bagged duck breasts out and threw some ice on them and into the bath. When it had cooled down, I put them back in. Still, it was apparent that the outside of the duck was more cooked than was ideal. They were still very tender throughout, but the outside (particularly the corners) were definitely not as juicy as the center, and had clearly seized up a bit more.
Hitch #3 was that I didn't have time to reduce some stock for the brown sugar glaze. I had intended to reduce some chicken stock, then combine it with the sous vide juices to make the glaze. Instead, I just skipped the stock. The resulting glaze was delicious on its own, but a bit too sweet to balance properly in the dish. With the stock reduction serving as a base, the glaze would have been the perfect foil to the meyer lemon puree, instead of being slightly cloying.
Hitch #4 was that I completely forgot to include the cracklins on the dish until after I'd already taken a bunch of photos. Many of them show the dish without arguably the tastiest component.
So, here's how it went down.
For the duck cracklins, I removed the skin from two breasts and scored the underside of the skin, being careful not to tear through, to help the fat render out. I drizzled both pieces of skin with some oil, salt, and pepper. Then I laid them flat in a cold, nonstick pan, and placed a heavy, flat-bottomed glass baking dish on top of them. On top of it I placed another baking dish into which I placed all the heaviest canned goods my pantry contained. I then cooked the skin on medium heat for about thirty-five minutes, turning once halfway, until all the fat had completely rendered out. Then I removed the cracklins to a cutting board and immediately cut them into rectangles and ate the scraps, giving Jeanette a sample for approval. Finally I left them on a paper towel.
For the breasts, which now had their skins removed, I salted them then vacuum sealed them with about a tablespoon and a half of butter, and about a tablespoon and a half of dark brown sugar. The plan was 140F for half an hour, as recommend by my pal T-K. Afterward, I reserved the liquid and juices from the sous vide process.
For the meyer lemon puree, I de-seeded a meyer lemon and then pureed it--the whole thing, pith and all--with a touch of salt and a touch of agave nectar and a slight splash of water. Once it was very smooth, I pushed it through a fine-mesh sieve, then transferred it to a squeeze bottle. This one was from my other pal, Big G (page 100), and I learned from Carol what the hell Big G meant when he wrote those particular directions.
For the glaze, I used all the liquid (butter, brown sugar, and duck juices) from the sous vide bags in which the breasts were cooked. I had intended to add these juices to a reduction of chicken or duck stock, but I didn't have time, so I just brought them to a boil and reduced a bit until they were not quite nappe, but nicely saucey.
For the red onion confit, an ingredient that I often keep on hand, I cooked minced red onions for a long time until they were deeply caramelized, then reserved, and re-heated in a microwave before serving.
For the mustard flowers, I just trimmed them from the stalks.
Posted by Barzelay on 2009/01/07 @ 23:59 | Comments (0) | Poultry