The first thing I thought of when we decided to highlight France for our European Stay-cation was that I’d get to try my hand at duck again. I’ve made duck confit twice before, and it was really successful – 50% of the time. 🙂 Seeing as how I didn’t have this site when I made the recipe, I couldn’t find the one I’d used.
Where do you think I turned?
That’s right, Serious Eats, yet again. And in the process of searching for a recipe that looked familiar for those lovely duck legs, I found a Sweet-Tart Duck Breast with Fresh Cherry Sauce recipe. MM is a huge fan of cherries, so it instantly made my list.
Again, since I’ve linked the recipe above, I’m not going to type it out. I followed it pretty closely, with the following exceptions:
- Browning the duck breast – that did not occur in a non-stick skillet. I hold pretty close to the fact that non-stick skillet should not be used over high heat, and there was no way that I was going to brown the duck over high heat, nor was I going to put the skillet in a hot oven. My All-Clad stainless steel pan would have to work. The only challenge – making sure that I didn’t rip the duck to shreds when turning it over.
- I didn’t wait until step 5 to get the cherry sauce started. If I had, the breasts would have absolutely gotten cold in the meantime.
It’s not the easiest thing, finding duck in the Midwest. The Asian market nearby had whole ducks, and duck wings, but I wanted legs and breasts, and I was completely unwilling to butcher a whole duck. I ended up finding what I was looking for at a local poultry butcher shop, and for relatively cheap, too!
All in all, it has the potential to be fantastic – I oversalted the duck to begin with – as you can probably see in the raw duck picture above. I’d also probably shorten the time that the duck is in the oven. While it was cooked the appropriate amount for use (more well done than rare), it was way over the temperature specified in the recipe. Next time, less salt, and a few minutes less in the oven.
The side? French fries! 🙂