Friday, April 3, 2009

Confit of Duck Leg, Pommes Sarladaise, fried hen egg and salad

So those of you playing along at home will notice that in fact the actual title of this recipe is "Confit of Liberty Pekin Duck Leg...with frisee salad" Well I went for a local duck instead of shipping them from Cali. and I couldn't find frisee anywhere, like anywhere at all, I checked no less then 10 different supermarkets. So C'est la vie I guess, but in the end I will just make the frisee salad another time and call it complete.

This recipe begins by curing the duck legs for hours in a salt and herb mixture that you can see below:

I added the duck legs to this and let them cure. While that was doing it's thing I prepared the herb sachet:

And then bagged it up with the cured duck legs:



If you look closely there you can see that the skin looks sort of ...thin. It later turned out that as a result of this I wasn't able to properly finish/plate the duck but i don't think it really affected the taste. Once it was confit'ed the skin basically fell apart and trying to crisp it up later led to it all falling apart. Oh well.

So once everything was cooked it looked like this:


You can see the skin falling off the de-boned thighs here (right before I press them between two pan sheets to make them a uniform thickness, which was pointless anyway since they fell apart in the end):

You can see my high tech weighting system here:

I then sliced the yukon gold potatoes and added them to a bag with some duck fat and another herb sachet:



finally I soft/hard boiled some eggs, coated them in flour/egg/potato starch and deep fried those badboys:
These eggs worked out well but I think I fried them a bit too much, I got the feeling from the book that the egg yolk was supposed to be runny but it ended up being fairly solid.

The final plating wasn't great because of the aforementioned skin issues, but it ended up looking something like this -

As you can see the fried coating sort of fell off the egg, not sure how I can prevent that but I bet if I made this a bunch i could come up with something, unfortunately deep fried eggs aren't really in my dietary plans. c'est la vie.

Overall this dish was a big hit and everyone who tried it loved it. The eggs could have been a bit softer but the duck was well cooked and very flavorful, I just wish I had got the skin to crisp up properly.