Duck roulade October 15, 2011

I was so excited by this challenge. Skin a duck then mince the meat and put it back into the skin to cook?! Brilliant. I started the same way as I did with the chicken – but following the instructions properly this time, so I ended up with a much larger piece of skin to work with.

I stuck the skin in the freezer while I worked on the rest of the dish. First I removed the duck breasts, and chopped one of them into strips. I seared them well over quite high heat.

When they were cooked, I put them in the fridge and cut up the rest of the duck meat, including the remaining duck breast, and minced all this with some pork fat, sage leaves, salt and pepper.

I cooked some chopped shallots in some sloe gin (no sherry, which is what the recipe called for) until they were quite soft, and put them in the refrigerator. When everything was cool, I added the onions and pieces of duck breast to the minced meat. I put this mixture back into the fridge while I scraped the fat off the skin.

Yes, you read that right. I took a sharp knife and began scraping the fat off the skin. I worked so slowly I ended up having to freeze the skin when I got about halfway through – the fat started melting, which made it a lot harder to scrape off.

I didn’t find this overwhelming or disgusting, but it did take a lot longer than I was expecting. Finally, I ended up with a mostly fat-free skin.

I trimmed the skin to make a more even shape, then added the minced duck mixture to the middle. I tied the whole lot up with some butcher’s twine and placed the duck on some precooked vegetables, and put the whole thing in the oven.

While the duck was cooking, I set to work turning the bones into stock and rendering the fat I’d scraped off the skin – I definitely used up as much of the duck as I could! After about 40 minutes, the duck was up to 60 degrees celcius.

I turned the oven up to brown the skin, and added some snow peas and beans to the vegetable mixture to cook. I turned the duck every 5 minutes, and after about 15 minutes the duck was nicely browned. I served it on top of the vegetables I’d cooked with the duck.

All the things I didn’t like about the chicken, I liked about the duck. The skin was flavoursome and moist, the minced duck was tasty, and the pieces of duck breast added texture and a nice seared flavour. The only thing I would change is maybe smoking the duck breasts before adding them to the roulade, to give even more flavour.

I love the idea of using the whole duck (almost) to make this meal. While I normally prefer duck meat in whole pieces, I really appreciated the combination of the skin, mince and pieces of meat in this dish.