How To Make Duck Leg Confit at Home (Christmas dinner ideas)

Hello everyone and welcome back to the French Cooking Academy channel and cooking classes. As you can see you can't see me today because we are concentrating on a culinary technique or a cooking technique. Today we learn how to prepare or to make duck legs confit. In French this is called cuisse de canard confit. This is a specialty usually coming from the southwest but it's spread out all of France. This recipe is actually very easy to make. It's a long-winded process because it goes in two stages. First stage we need to cure the meat for 24 hours with a spiced salt using these ingredients and the second part we need to cook the recipe. For the ingredients the hard things to find sometimes is this the duck fat. You need duck or goose fat and a lot of it. Usually it's around one liter for four duck legs so that's quite a lot. And for the spiced salt we're going to be using rock salt, different peppercorns, juniper berries, thyme, bay leaf and I'm going to grind all that using a pestle and mortar. You can use a food processor as well. Let's see how this is done. And now let's start the recipe. Now before we do anything today it is very important to stress again that before you do any preparation you have to wash your hands in general but today I'm stressing it again because it's super important because we're going to be using our hands and we're going to be handling raw meat that we're going to rub with a salt and then put in the fridge for 24 hours and then it's going to be used and served to guests. So you don't want to contaminate anything so wash your hands you know really well before you start. Now we're going to start by making the salt on the spiced salt. There's different ways of making it. I'm using rock salt and I'm just going to grind it slowly and using a like this a pestle and mortar. I'm just going in circles like this and don't like tap like this you know like a crazy person and usually the use of the pestle and mortar you can tap a little bit but it's just that circling motion. So we're going to start by circling like that. You can use a food processor if you want but that's you know that's rewarding to do this by hand until we get a nice kind of semi-coarse salt. Okay so what I've got here I'm using my hand because they're nice and clean you can see there's the kind of roughness. I don't grind it all the way because there's other ingredients we're going to put in mainly a little bit of peppercorns and mix with juniper berries and I'm just using these ingredients to keep the recipe classic. Juniper berries they are actually very very good for game. So here again it is a matter of crushing slightly the berries and everything like that and the peppercorn and then taking your time on doing that grinding again. So we're gonna do that again another grind. The pepper and the juniper berries are in that's what we get nicely colored nicely fragrant and now we're gonna add a little bit of thyme there's roughly about like you know we'd say like a teaspoon I'm just using a dry thyme maybe a teaspoon of dry thyme not too much and then a few bay leaves. You see I've got some broken ones three or four it doesn't really matter so I'm breaking down like that and then I'm gonna do again a final grind using my pestle and mortar here I don't know if that's the pestle no that's the mortar I think I don't know but anyway you got the idea you grind the whole thing until it's done. All done and this is my end result so as you can see there are pieces of bay leaves and they're not like pulverized or anything like this but that's okay it's gonna go on the meat and don't get alarmed by the amount of salt but after the curing it's discarded so it's all good now let's coat the duck leg with that mix. Now the second stage I've transferred my salt into a container it's more practical and basically from here we're just gonna make sure that there is salt and spices everywhere so I start you can start on either side I'm starting with one side generous amount of salt and then using our hands again it's we're gonna massage the duck give it a little massage you know don't be shy they like this the legs nice and tender so we're gonna incorporate the salt and make sure like this it's everywhere massaging the meat I'm Japanese style you know they like to do this so you get the idea and then we turn them around and we're gonna repeat the process look at this lovely duck leg so same thing here boom you don't have to you know if you have a bit of excess of salt I rather have too much than too little to be honest and it is discarded I'm stressing this it is discarded afterwards so don't think like oh my god it's gonna be super salty no you know it's like certain fish that are kept in salt and things like that you know all right so same thing very quick massage and then we're gonna put them in another container and make sure it's everywhere so this is basically the result of a leg that's been done cured and you got the salt everywhere it's nicely spiced up finally when our duck legs are ready and we have to wrap them up in some plastic like that so you can use one plastic over the three legs but from the books I've read the preferred method is to really really wrap your duck legs tidy I didn't do a great job here and individually wrap them to make sure there's not like much contact to the air so I'm pressing them down like that so I'm going to repeat the process for all the legs and we are done look at this how simple was that so I've got my duck leg and it's totally wrapped up and you can see all the spices in there the meat the salt and that's going to give some flavor that's going to cure the meat and we're going to leave this in the fridge for 24 hours ideally now if you want you can vary the spice you can look online there's other recipes but the technique is you have to cure first and then cook so we're going to leave them to rest 24 hours and then we'll continue the recipe when it's done and now for the stage two so 24 hours have passed and here's the meat again as we left it before so what we're gonna do is unwrap it and as you can see there's a lot of moisture that's come out and this is the goal also of of this salt is to remove the excess of moisture so what we need to do here is to really try to dry the meat as much as we can and then remove the excess of salt and herbs and stuff like that from the top so you can use a brush like this so you can use your hands if you really don't want to have anything on there some of the techniques consist actually of rinsing your duck legs under clear water for me though you know what i like to keep the seasoning on so i'm just going to remove the excess like that for each leg and then clean that plate and reserve them neatly one by one on the plate here my duck legs are now cleaned and i've removed the excess and as you can see i want you to have a closer look it's not like they're covered in salt or anything i still have a few of these herbs that gives it really a rustic look and if you look at the skin you know there's no salt it's been nice and dry nicely cured and now we're ready to cook this so we're going to go on the stove and start the cooking process with the duck fat we're now ready to cook the duck leg so there's different techniques some people like to do this in the oven when you begin it is important to use a thermometer because this has to be a very low temperature cooking so in fact your duck fat usually cannot boil it must barely be simmering so you need to have the temperature set at all times at about 200 degrees fahrenheit which is about 90-95 degrees let's say more 95 degrees celsius so you start with a pan okay i'm using the cast iron le creuset and you take your duck fat and i'm going to use about a liter and i'm just going to try to detach some of the fat if i can from that box and you're going to add it slowly melting it in the pan and we're going to first try to reach a sweet point like temperature before we do anything else so you put all of the duck fat in i'm going to be using almost a liter and then i'll show you the result okay Houston we are at 80 it's going slowly towards 90 degrees so what i'm gonna do now is to add a few aromatics in the oil i've got three garlic cloves two bay leaves in there so i'm just gonna you know mix around that's all you need to give some flavor and then i'm gonna add my duck legs in and i'm gonna put the skin down like that and then another one and then put them all in now for the cooking of these what i recommend for the heat put your heat on the lowest setting you can okay because like this you're sure you're not going to go over because it's very easy as you can see you can see i'm already at 90 here so really put the heat on the lowest of the lowest temperature and some guys say that can be cooked even at 80 degrees celsius which is about 180 degrees fahrenheit so don't take any chances to to have that grease to boil always keep the temperature as low as you can so lowest it so my duck is now in here i'm gonna have to put some parchment paper to make sure it's nicely covered i'm gonna have to put some weight on to make sure the duck leg stays submerged in the fat for the final step as i said i'm taking a parchment paper lid and i'm gonna put in my fat like that and the reason i'm doing this because on top i'm gonna put like a weight and this is going to be in the shape of that handy kind of lead that i've got so i can still grab it and the rest is going to be submerged in oil and here starts the cooking time two hours minimum and to cook these duck legs so for me i'm gonna count two hours depending on how many you have it can take up to two two and a half extreme would be three hours so we're gonna check after two hours if they're nice and tender they will be cooked so i'll see you then in two hours time okay guys this been two and a half hours in the mix i've opened the lid and everything the legs are cooked but for me you know what i don't think it's cooked enough i had the idea that the the confit of duck was really falling off the bone as you can see it detaches but it will need another yeah i think another half hour so you see two hours not enough so definitely at slow cooking like this you're talking about three hours two and a half and three hours i'm gonna wait again and take them out when they're ready all right so it's been three hours the legs are ready and as you can see on on that side here you see how it detaches and you see the bone that's really the sign that they're ready so usually you're gonna grab the legs you see that's how they look like and we're gonna reserve them in an earthware now just give you a little look of the of the leg on here that's how it looks like now usually there's two things you can do at this stage or you can keep the legs and keep them in the fridge or let them cool down and keep them for let's say a week before consumption i think up to a week easily and if you do that you're gonna put all of the legs in here in an earthware filter your grease over the leg let the fat solidify and then you can store them in the fridge and it can be kept easily for a week so you can make this way in advance if like me you want to consume the duck legs directly and you can just take them out drain them on something maybe a little bit of paper towel on the plate or something and then we're going to pan fry them and to give the the skins a little crispiness before we can serve them okay so in my case i'm going to use that option we're going to use them now so we're going to go to the next stage that if you're about to serve them how to crisp the skins all right so when you're ready to serve your duck legs you take a frying pan you can also doing doing it under the broiler but it's all the matter of getting these skins on that side a bit crispy so i'm just gonna leave this without any oil and for just five minutes or so i'm gonna leave it there without moving it around to just get this nice crispy skins i've just turned over my leg and from what you can see here the pan fried version give you that kind of flatness it's nice and brown but to be honest not sure it's the best one so let me try another one under the broiler and we'll compare both versions and there we have it both version here is the broiler version this is the pan fried version you can choose either way you want the result is pretty much the same what i can say is that there was much more duck fat that came out under the broiler it was really bubbling away while on the pan fried it seemed to just dry up the skin and that was about it but in terms of the meat i think inside the result is going to be the same so let's plate this up and see how we can eat that and here we are so how do we eat those well a lot of people will eat them with potatoes you can do the pan fried potatoes but really for me you know what i like the very very simplistic version with just a green salad that may surprise you but i only like to eat those with a piece of salad so you can either just serve the leg like this and for me that's it a bistro style type of you know of leg and the most important here when you get this is to really have the meat recooked so look at that so what we want to see here is this that with a spoon look at this it is falling off the bone this is what we mean look at that meat and it is really heavy and remember it's cooked in fat so you don't want to have let me try it it's nicely seasoned so there's really no need to add anything at all i know it looks simplistic but for me really the only thing that can cut through the fat of this is this french dressing with a little bit of duck confit like this and add this a glass of wine and you're done beautiful simple pleasures that's what it's all about so this is the side here and if you want to have it and see the other side that's like this and you can serve serve it any way you like of course this is not too pretty sorry because i've been detailing this thing and if you want you can add some tomatoes and stuff like that but really honestly for me doesn't need much it just need to be just all about the meat but anyway guys i hope you got enough information today on how to make this confit leg and this confit of duck the cooking times remember two hours 30 minutes if you're not going to consume them immediately meaning that you're going to put them in the pot cover them in grease and let them cool down if you want to eat them straight away i recommend three hours at 200 degrees fahrenheit but that's it for me today i hope you enjoyed the video i'll see you all next time on another christmas like video i'm going to run for christmas and the next time we're going to make another dessert which is actually the bears in red wine subscribe request i see you all then take care bye