Super Easy Sous Vide Duck Confit

This is what you make when you want to impress. Duck confit. Should be an interesting episode. Why do you say it like it might not be interesting? Because it sounds really fancy, but it's actually a really really simple dish. There's like three ingredients aside from the duck leg. You have salt, rosemary, and garlic. When you think of duck confit, you're like beautiful French cooking, like fine dining in French restaurants. You're also missing a huge ingredient, which is the duck fat. Yeah. Where it kind of like just cooks in its own fat, right? Yeah. Where's that? Well, for when you do a sous vide, you don't need it. It's going to release its own fat, and it will cook in its own juices anyway. And we're cooking this for 36 hours, so it's gonna have tons of time in its own juices. And you don't have to keep a giant container of it. I don't even know where you buy duck fat. How do people get duck fat? Do they just drain the fat? I mean, this sounds pretty morbid, but like, you know, get a duck and scrape it off. How does it work? I don't know. Maybe you let me know if you know how it works. I think this would make the perfect weekend date night dinner. When you need to impress someone, they're coming over, you plan this ahead three days in advance, you're good to go. Or... Three days? Or, or... 36 hours is one and a half days. Sorry, one and a half days. My math is really bad. I thought it was 12 hours a day. You prepare this a day and a half in advance, you're ready to go. The other option is that you prepare whenever you want, leave in your fridge for a couple of days. And when you're ready, put it pop in the oven before they come in. You have a beautiful meal. First step, generously salt, like a lot of salt, because usually this is a cured dish, right? Honestly, when you're sous vide-ing, it doesn't really matter if you got all the sides or not, because it's all going to circulate in that tiny bag. It's going to be living in its own juices. Here's my favorite kitchen tool now. Calvin got this for me at some point. Okay, so we roll this. You roll that and... Oh look, like it's already skin. All the skin is on the inside. And then this is the best part. You know, like people don't like these single-use tools, but I feel like the garlic press is worth it. Because now you don't have stinky fingers. Yeah, squeeze this out. Perfect. It's just on that side? Do you need on the skin side? You don't need on the skin side, only the bottom side, and you won't even taste it later. So why do you need it if you don't taste it? I mean, like you won't be very pungent. Like people worry that in the sous vide, that it's going to be very pungent, but because we're cooking it for so long, people are not going to notice it. So that's pretty much it, like very simple. Next step, we're just going to bag it up. Just two sprigs like that, don't have to do anything? Don't have to do anything. We're not going to cook it down later. We're going to remove it. So the easier it is to do that, the better. We're going to just drop it in. Okay, so as I told you, the easiest, easiest date night dinner ever. We've sealed it nice and airtight. One thing I didn't mention before, but it's really helpful for me, is always put the presentation side on the smooth side of the food saver bag. One side has all the grooves, one side is smooth. So then you don't end up with like this bumpy, ugly looking thing when you're serving. I will attach a fork to it and this helps to weigh it down so it doesn't come floating up. We have our finished duck leg. I'm going to open her up. I think what's cool is that, did you add extra oil in here? No. So this is all the fat that came out of the duck? That's all the fat that came out of the duck. All right, so you can remember our old rosemary that we put in there. You want to be careful at this point because it smells really good. So we're going to take out of the bag. We try and keep, remove as much of the juices as possible. Straight into the oven, it's going to take about 10 minutes. We want it to get to a nice golden brown color. We don't need to wait. We're looking for some nice skin and then we're looking for some very tender fall off the bone meat. All right, ready? Cheers. It tastes really nice. But look how soft it is. Look, it just breaks apart with a fork. I'm like butchering it, literally. But yeah, look how... Look at that, it just falls straight off. I've had duck confit a few times before and it wasn't really remarkable to me at the restaurant. And I always remember that it being like immensely salty. So this one, like I can still taste the duck. I can taste the rosemary. It is a little salty but it's not like I'm gonna die. I think it's meant to be salty. Like the original version is cured, we obviously didn't cure it. You know when David Chang says the right amount of salt, if you add any more salt, it's too salty? Yeah. I think we're at that point. I feel like any more salt and you would notice it, but right now you don't notice it. You notice that there's something there but I enjoy it. It's very tender. For the skin, would you be able to do it on a pan instead? Yeah. To make it crispier? Yeah, we can definitely do this on a pan. This is worth a 36-hour wait in the fact that you do not need to have a gallon of duck fat, duck oil. Whenever you want duck confit, all you need to do is just warm it up in the oven for like 10 minutes or sear it in a pan for a couple of minutes and you're good. You don't have to you know make it from scratch every time. You just like you know make ahead.