Guillons de canard

What do you get as a bi-product of rendering fat from duck skin? Crispy bits of duck skin. What do you do then? Why you add a bit of duck meat, onion, salt and pepper, put the whole in a terrine mold, bake and eat as you would creton. This invention of my favourite charcutier is smooth textured and has a taste which reminds me of pork rinds though a million times more sophisticated. This is the breakfast of champions and those unafraid of cardiac arrest for sure.

Duck Prosciutto

So for Christmas I got something I really, really wanted: Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. This book is all about prosciutto, pancetta, sausage (fresh and dried), bacon, pâtés, smoking, etc. etc. etc. I've already read the whole thing from front to back and have recently purchased my very own manual meat grinder. For my first stab at the fine art of charcuterie, I wanted something simple, something I wouldn't totally mess up and that wouldn't cost me a fortune. When it comes to artisinal food making, I like baby steps. It's like bread. There's a learning curve there and it's no use trying to overrun it.

So I decided to go with something cured. Curing is simply leaving something in salt long enough that some liquid is extracted and the salt penetrates the meat in order to stop any harmful bacteria from forming (or something like that). Above is a photo of duck aiguillettes which is the tenderloin of the magret which is the breast of a duck raised for foie gras. I decided to go with the smaller aiguillettes first because they're cheaper and smaller which means that there's less chance that I'll mess things up. Or so I thought.

My charcutier friend at the market told me that 1 or 2 hours would be fine for curing the meat. However, this being my first venture into the world of charcuteries, I left the aiguillettes in kosher salt for about 4 hours (the recipe in the abovementioned book calls for magrets and 24 hours). After this, I rinsed the aiguillettes and patted them dry. I then wrapped them in cheesecloth and strung them up. Now the ideal location for hanging drying duck meat is a cool (8 to 15 degrees Celcius), humid place. The only part in my apartment that sort of fit the bill is the drafty window in the dining room. So up went the aiguillettes, my roommates looking on and wondering what in the world I was doing...I didn't tell them.

After 4 days, the aiguillettes were hard as a rock. As you can see above, they were done though they weren't the rich, soft texture of prosciutto but rather the chewy texture of jerky. And oh my god were they ever salty. A white crust of salt had coated the exterior of the aiguillettes which I scraped off thus making the duck edible.

Though I did leave the aiguillettes in the salt too long to start with and didn't use a thick enough piece of meat, I now feel confident in moving onto the full magret. Through the salt the rich taste of the duck came shining through. It was really a decent first taste at the potential of my charcuterie skills.

So next stop, real duck prosciutto and then fresh morning sausage with ginger and sage. Oh yeah!

P.S. Michael Ruhlman, the co-author of Charcuterie, maintains a pretty shnazzy blog at http://blogs.ruhlman.com/. Check it out.

Duck Tenderloin with Clementine Couli

The French guy at the market had packaged of duck tenderloins for sale this week. I mean duck is already a treat, but having the choice of nothing but the tenderloin is the epitomization of having your cake and eating it too. The wild, almost steaklike taste, coupled with the soft texture of chicken is what makes duck so enjoyable to me. It's so much better than both beef and chicken that I don't know why it's not more readily available than what it is. Yet given that duck is not a usual guest at the dinner table, I don't have thousands of ideas for it. True I could treat it as I would a roast or chicken or a steak but I figured the usual combination of duck with orange would be a safe bet. So off I went making a mild couli of clementine juice and zest with a tad bit of sugar and drizzling it on top of the gammy tenderloins I'd simply cooked in some butter till the exterior was crispy but the interior was still pinkish. It's a beautiful thing to be able to treat oneself.

Yet Another Dégustation

I guess it's going to be a tradition of sorts for now that we pick up some delicious new cheese at the market on Saturday's and pig out on a dégustation.

For this particular plate of assorted goodies, I prepared a salsa verde (or whatever you call a salsa made with green tomatoes). I put green tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, orange zest and juice, pureed it Mexican salsa style - as opposed to American style chunky salsa - and served it to go along with my multi-grain baguette. A great accompanying little treat to this were the very thin slices of dried duck. Though they were very fatty - as only duck can be - and barely tasted anything unless you sucked on them, those little slices of duck were a good initiation to other items that particular vendor has at the market. These include foi gras, terrines, French-style sausages, and other weird French delights.

As for the fruits and veggies, I cut up some apples, pears, cucumber, served them with grapes and these really beautiful looking sour prunes I found at the market. Along with some merlot (this time I tried to read the descriptions of the wines on their labels to make sure the pairing wasn't totally off) and a cheese whose name I can't remember but was stronger than gruyère but milder than the Le Comté which I had last week, this dégustation was a nice light meal.