Thursday, December 25, 2014

Sous vide duck

I recently upgraded from my DIY sous vide controller to a Anova One sous immersion circulator. While my old rig was good, it was too much hassle to set it up every time so I wasn't cooking sous vide as often as I would have liked. Since getting the Anova I've been cooking sous vide way more often. Most recently, I cooked duck sous vide (for why, see Stacy's blog post here).

Unfortunately, I'm low on pictures, but in short, I broke down the duck into parts and cooked each part differently. Stacy made a soup with the bones. I sous vided the breast, skin on, to medium rare (54C/129F), then seared it skin-side-down in a pan to crisp the skin. No pictures of this, since we ate it Friday night. I served it with an orange sauce made with reduced orange juice, orange rind, sugar and triple sec.

I deskinned and cured the legs and thighs overnight using a dry cure of salt, coriander, black pepper, and dried thyme. Then, I cut up the skin and rendered out the fat, and made gribenes from the skin. After the overnight cure (~10hrs), I rinsed off the cure and vacuum bagged the legs and thighs with some rendered duck fat, fresh thyme and orange zest, and cooked them sous vide for approximately 25 hours at 65C/149F.

I pulled it off the bone, and served it warm, on a salad of arugula, red onion, and mandarin oranges, with a dressing made with the orange sauce from the previous night, rice wine vinegar and olive oil, and topped with gribenes "croutons":