Cooking Restaurant Quality Duck (How to Make it at Home)

So this is how to get perfectly crispy duck with a nice cuisine at home. This is the way that I often try and get my duck the crispiest in a restaurant setting without the proper setup that you get from proper Chinese crispy duck. This is how I always got shown how to do it. I've just got a duck here. The duck itself isn't too old. A duck that's like really, really old, it's like much thicker on the skin. So it's a nice young duck, it's a Peking style duck. What you'll see on most Chinese cooking videos on how to get crispy skin, they'll blow this up with a pneumatic pump. What that does is it separates the membrane from the skin and allows it to get crispy. We just use this sausage bricker, and the idea being this actually gets rid of some of the membrane below. Don't wanna go all the way through to the meat, but we wanna systematically go all the way along the duck. This is gonna help the skin render out. It just starts to divide that skin away from the rest of the carcass and the meat and the duck. You don't wanna properly perforate the meat like all the way in, but you wanna break that membrane. You could use a toothpick, but it might take you a little bit longer. Or you could use a really small, sharp knife. We actually used to do it in the restaurants just with a kebab skewer. So once that's finished, I've got some boiling water. I'm just gonna add a good amount of salt to the boiling water. I'm just gonna dip it in, crown side down, for about 30 seconds. So what this is gonna do is it's just gonna start rendering out the fat from the bird, basically weakening the membrane below the skin so that when you whack it in a nice hot oven, it's gonna start to get super, super crispy. Kills any bacteria that's inside the bird as well, so it's slightly more hygienic when we dry age it. And then into ice water. This is just really to stop the bird from cooking whilst we do this process. And then one more time. And out we go. Just be careful of the water that comes out the cavity. You can burn your hand. And it should feel nice and soft, like nice and sort of like it's almost started to cook. My little hack is just dry this off and then whack it into a container with lots of coarse salt. And I whack my duck, skin side down, and I just coat it. And I'll leave that now for 24 hours on the cure. So this is one that I've got that I made yesterday. Just gonna wash off the salt. So there we go. What we've got is, you can see, you can almost feel it, it's super dry, waxy. What you can do now is you can just start from the bottom and just gently score from the spine and then all the way around. Scoring will just further release the skin and the membrane around the skin. And it'll allow the fat to render out more quickly, which will give you a crispier bird at the end. You really don't need to go too far. So if you can see really closely here, I'm just going into the layer, not into the bottom membrane. That's gonna protect the meat whilst it cooks. And I'm basically doing this incredibly lightly. I'm pretty much letting the knife do the work. Skin is nowhere near as tough because it's been broken down by the blanching process and by the curing process. And what we're not gonna do now is season it because it's got plenty of salt in that skin anyway from where it's been curing overnight. And then we're gonna roast it. We're gonna start it super high. So this is really important. I'm gonna start it at 200 degrees. I'll turn it down after the initial six minute cook. So 200 for six minutes, then we're gonna turn it down to 140 just to allow the meat to come up to temperature and then we'll rest. Whilst we wait for that, I'll just do a really quick glaze. Super simple. It's just honey with a few aromats, which we bring to the boil. Just got some star anise and then we'll add the fresh herbs at the end, bit of Szechuan just for a little bit of light heat. And then we've got all these nice fresh aromats which we'll add at the end. Our honey with our spices is just coming up to the simmer. We're gonna reduce it slightly and we're just gonna get a little bit of color on it and then we'll finish it with lots of fresh aromats. Crush a couple of garlic cloves just for sort of a savory character to the glaze. Got orange zest which we'll just peel. Last minute infusion. Few sage leaves. Just do two or three. It's quite intense sage. And then you've got, we've also got some little lavender leaves which I'm gonna pick up a few on the top. Let's save a few of the flowers. But that's our infusion. Our honey's just come up to the boil there. You can really smell the star anise already. It's quite a strong flavor. About three or four minutes into the cooking process and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the tray out and then that's the first layer of fat that's come out of it. I've just caught that on a tray underneath but I'm gonna now transfer that into my pan. I'm gonna let the, I'm gonna let the duck rest on the rack and continue the cooking process. So another four minutes left on the cooking there. So we're just looking for that to brown a little bit but not too much. Whack our aromats in there. So orange, sage, lavender as well. It's important that you don't overcook the honey because it's gonna go back onto the duck to sort of finish the cooking process. It'll get a little bit darker than this but if you don't do the stage of cooking it first, it won't stick to the duck breast whilst it's in the oven. One thing I've always found about duck, people eat it out a lot. It's one of those things I think people, people don't tend to wanna cook at home because they think it's a bit too much of a challenge. I mean, the reality is this method, I suppose it's a little bit long-winded but it's quite readily available. You can get duck from most supermarkets in some form or another. But yeah, it's one of those things. It's a challenge, you know? People don't necessarily wanna mess it up at home. So this is nice and thick now, which is good. And that's ready to glaze onto our duck when it comes out. And this is what we're looking for. So we don't wanna ever sacrifice the cooking of the duck for the crisp but you can see before it's even finished, it's got a really, really beautiful crispy skin. This is a really satisfying bit but we've got our duck fat that's been rendering out. And that just goes over the top. And then we let it rest until it comes up to temperature. So this won't be on temp now, it needs to come to 56 degrees. Keep this pan because the last stage is gonna be back in this pan to sear it one last time. Carve it off the bone, glaze it, decorate it, and there you've got the perfect crispy duck. So that's on 36 degrees but I'm quite confident that'll come quite close up to temp. So allow it to rest and then we can always push on a little bit further. Better to let it gently come up rather than giving it a gray line by giving it too much heat, especially when you're trying to get that crispy skin. So now we're just gonna allow it to rest for at least 10 minutes. It's been resting there for at least 10 minutes. And then that's on 58. So you can safely assume the median's gonna be around that. And then we're just gonna finish it in a nice hot pan. No, we're just doing it dry because there'll be more fat that escapes out of the duck anyway. We wanna do it fairly hot because otherwise what'll happen is it'll start to overcook the outside of the duck, which we don't want. Still fat left in there. And then any fat left over from that process, we can liberally glaze up our duck breast. Rested for a little bit longer and I've just finished it under the grill. Giving it that final layer of crunch and crust to it. It's a really nice way to do it. You can just present it by just laying some little lavender leaves on it. You could just use a little few rosemary leaves. This is if you were taking this to the table on a Sunday roast before you're carving it up for your family. So there we go. That's it. It's finished, glazed duck with a beautifully crispy skin. Just go around the rib cage like so. And then you can just go through this bit. So just go around this little nubbin. It's still really nice and juicy. Carve it.