What’s up, duck
Duck season is here, so make the most of the bird, says Timothy Barber
Can there be any dish more redolent of the bad old days of restaurant food than duck a l’orange? It may be a classic, but let’s be honest, duck in a sweet orange sauce is more likely to be the sorry fall-back choice of chefs for whom a confit (in which the cured meat is poached in its own fat) is too much effort, rather than anything you’d actually want to eat if given the choice.
Cooked well, though, the humble quacker can produce one hell of a piece of meat, rich and succulent. Yet in London’s restaurants it’s rare to find it done in ways other than confit, crispy or doused in the dreaded orange gloop – and it’s normally overdone at that.
“Many chefs just don’t know how to cook it,” says French cook Nicolas Laridan, formerly of fine dining institution Le Gavroche, and soon to open his new place Le Bouchon Breton in Spitalfields. “All they know is canard confit because it’s something they’ve learned to do over the years – it’s a shame, because it’s a really special meat.”
For lovers of well-cooked duck however, good things are coming. This week marks the start of the wild duck-shooting season, which means that eateries with a seasonal interest in game dishes will shortly be featuring it on their menus and a few will think of things other than confit to do with it.
And there’s a world of difference between the wild game variety and the fatty, reared variety that crisps up in the windows of Chinatown diners.
“Reared ducklings don’t fly, so they put on loads of fat which makes the meat more tender,” says Mike Robinson, the chef behind well regarded gastropub, The Pot Kiln in rural Berkshire. Robinson specialises in seasonal produce with a special emphasis on the game season, and knows his Daffys from his Donalds.
“Wild duck can mean a variety of different species, such as teal, wigeon or mallard, which have very little fat because they fly every day, so there’s no flab. Mallard is the most common, and it needs to be cooked slowly but carefully to be tender. It’s not easy if you don’t know your stuff.”
One of Laridan’s favourite methods for cooking a mallard is to braise it, as in the dish mallard salmis. First roasting the duck on the bone for a limited time, Laridan then removes the meat from the bone and braises it slowly with juniper berries and bay leaves, for a tender, gamey result.
Robinson points out that, because duck is such a rich meat, it needs something sharp with it – hence the age-old fashion for tangy orange. Instead, he recommends spiced redcurrant jelly and red cabbage. “A dish fit for a king,” he says.