Cooking duck is as simple as cooking chicken. It provides a great quality to price ratio. When stored properly, duck meat has a long life. There are different ways to cook the meat like roasting, sautéing, grilling, braising, and pan-frying. Also, you can easily cook it on the barbecue. Duck meat tends to pair perfectly with fruits like apples, blueberries, cherries, and oranges. Also, it works well with bay leaf, thyme, and sage.
Kinds of Duck
When you go to a grocery store, you will usually find different varieties of duck meat such as:
- Peking duck. This is the most common duck meat variety you can find frozen in grocery stores. This is because of the duck’s tasty flavour, its ability to grow rapidly, and its ability to produce a big amount of eggs.
- Barbary duck. This is the leanest type of domestic duck, containing 50 percent more breast meat than others. Since it is lean and small-boned, this duck variety is quite meaty and ideal to breed for foie gras.
- Mulard duck. This force-fed duck is a crossbreed of the female Peking duck and male Barbary duck.
How to Cook Duck Meat
Below are some cooking methods you can use to enjoy the tasty duck meat:
- Roasting. This method lets you minimise the fat content. You just need to prick the skin with a fork before you cook the duck and roast it on a rack or spit. Just look for roasted Canards du lac Brome duck recipe.
- Grilling. To decrease the amount of fat in a duck breast before grilling, create small incisions in the skin and immerse in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. Then, prick the skin a few times using a fork before you put the meat on the barbecue.
- Pan-frying. Because duck skin is very fatty, you can pan-fry the breast filets without adding butter or oil. You can do this by scoring the skin with a sharp knife and putting the filets skin-side down over moderate heat until you see the fat starting to seep into the pan.
- Sautéing. This cooking method is an excellent way to prepare duck as the meat tends to cook quickly while retaining its tenderness and releasing its oriental aromas. As the skin of the duck is fatty, you can stir-fry or pan-fry it without oil or butter. To give flavour to the meat, use seasonings and marinades. To ensure uniform cooking, the meat must be cut thinly.
