Why a Duck? (part two): Seared Duck Breast with Duck Risotto

In this post we continue our cooking project from the last one.  Next up on our duck agenda would be seared duck breast served with duck risotto and a pan sauce made with our duck demi glace and some beautiful homemade preserved cherries in beaujolais wine that we had reserved from last summer’s harvest. 

(We learned to make these cherries from Eugenia Bone’s book Well Preserved. You can find the recipe at various places on the internet, including http://www.denverpost.com/food/ci_12595911.  But note that Bone has since revised this recipe to include 6 cups rather than two quarts of red wine.  One of the great things about Bone’s book is that she guides you toward making preserves with savory uses and helps you think about how to use them). 

To be frank, we thought this was one of the very best things we have ever cooked — which means, we dare add, one of the best things we’ve ever eaten. 

Our approach here was conditioned by a variety of recipes from different books.   The basic technique for making risotto is widely available, so here we’ll primarily emphasize simply that this dish really depends on a few key ingredients:  the shallots you first soften in olive oil, the rice, the parmigiano reggiano and a pat of butter added at the end — but above all, the stock in which you cook the rice.   

True Italian-style risotto absolutely requires the variety of rice called “Arborio,” which was named after the town in the Piedmont region where it was originally grown.  At one time this variety of rice was grown only in Italy, but today it is also grown in California and elsewhere in the United States.  Arborio rice is distinguished by its high starch content, which produces the creamy texture of the finished dish, and especially by its ability to absorb large amounts of liquid without becoming mushy as regular rice would do.  Thus, in this dish, the rice is really there as an edible, chewy container for the stock; and the taste of the risotto depends above all on the concentrated flavor of all the bounty that went into your stockpot.  The texture of the finished dish, however, depends on the cooking, which has to be done with constant attention at the last minute, just before serving.

(The whole-grain advocate in the household would like to point out that you can make a pretty decent farroto, a kind of higher-fiber risotto, using semi-pearled farro.)  

Other recipes taught us that the duck breasts, boneless but with the skin still attached, should be pounded flat and the skin scored in a checkerboard pattern with a sharp knife.  The pounding allows them to cook quickly and evenly; the scoring of the skin encourages the fat to melt slowly and the skin to crisp over a medium-high fire.  

While we have eaten less meat since moving to California, we’ve had to learn to wrestle more intimately with that meat.  If you buy a duck at the market, you will need to break it down yourself.  Learning to do so has enabled us to buy whole birds but to make a duck leg ragu one night and seared duck breasts another.

Basically, for this dish you sear your duck breasts quickly on both sides over medium-high to high heat, and take them out and keep them warm.  Then you should pour off most of the fat from the pan (duck is notoriously high in fat), and then make a quick pan sauce in the same pan. As is well known, duck takes well to a slightly sweet sauce because of its dark and relatively fatty meat.  The sauce here is essentially a variation on the famous French red-wine sauce sometimes called “marchand de vin”: a combination of pan drippings, red wine, and stock or demi-glace (the latter being nothing other than an already-reduced form of stock).   In this case we used our cherries, which had been preserved in reduced red wine, instead of just regular wine out of the bottle, which also provided a light but not cloying note of sweetness. Basically, after removing the cooked duck breasts, you "de-glaze" the pan with wine (or, in our case, with our preserved cherries in wine), stirring to dislodge any brown bits; and then add your demi-glace (which will quickly melt into the hot liquid), and reduce under low to medium heat until it has the consistency of a sauce. You can also use regular liquid stock here, which will just mean that you need longer to reduce it.

This dish thus depended on two labor-intensive ingredients that we had in the pantry.  The cherries in wine allowed us to remember and savor the ghost of the taste of early summer.  

The demi-glace is the flavor of duck reduced to a dark paste that will keep for a long time in the refrigerator, much longer than would regular fresh liquid stock.  Indeed, our modern word “restaurant” originally referred to something like demi-glace: that is, to a concentrated meat or poultry broth.  Thus the first French restaurants in the eighteenth century resembled Boulette’s Larder in the San Francisco Ferry Building, selling ready-made bouillons and “restaurants” for immediate consumption or to take home. As Susan Pinkard writes in her A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, “Given how time-consuming it was to make these kitchen staples from scratch, buying them already prepared in just the amount needed would have made a lot of sense for smaller households” (206).  Even as it is interesting to be reminded how the commercialization of cooking and eating emerged from the marketing of prepared “restaurants” it is also a pleasure to reverse that process, starting with market raw materials and cooking from scratch.

The leftovers were equally good.  One of us learned in childhood that many leftovers can be turned into savory cakes with molten centers and golden crispy edges.  The risotto was no exception.  We rolled the cold risotto into cakes with oiled hands, dusted them with parmesan, and then let them set in the refrigerator for a few hours before frying them in a mixture of butter and oil over medium heat.  It’s important not to worry them if you want a nice crust (and you do).  Served with Bledsoe’s Calibrese sausages (when their chalk board said “limited supply” we immediately bought them) and the leftover pan sauce, the cakes were less elegant than in their previous incarnation but just as good, if not better.