A few months ago I made twenty pounds of duck confit using a basic salt cure (recette de confit de canard). Dinner yesterday evening was confit de canard aux pommes de terre, prepared by sautéing thinly sliced potatoes in duck fat and gently heating whole duck legs until the skins were crisp.
I wanted a medium to heavy bodied wine with enough acidity to match the weight of dark meat and cut through the fat so I chose a Côtes du Rhône. If you're inclined to eschew terroir based pairings, a barolo or pinot noir are also fine matches. For those insistent on serving a white wine, a riesling is suitable.
It's chic in some foodie circles to wax poetic
about crispy duck skin, almost to the point that the raison d’être of duck
confit becomes the crackling. In soundbite driven foodie discourses there's a tendency to treat cooking and eating as competitive sports. The point then becomes playing games of one-upmanship with the requisite preening, strutting and stroking.
One rendering of this foodie "logic" I had was a kind of duck chicharones. The chef shallow fried a duck leg confit, skin side down, in about an inch of oil and finished the whole thing under a salamander or broiler.
If you're imagining a luscious piece of meat with a perfectly crisp and puffy cap of duck fat, that's what the menu and waiter encourage you to do. The reality, however, is that duck legs aren't entirely sheathed in a protective layer of fat, exposed portions of flesh turn leathery and tough with aggressive high heat cooking.
All this is to say, that I often stick to tried and true cooking techniques rather than experimenting for the sake of novelty. I don't have to try everything to know that some things just won't work or taste good.
After dinner I had three pieces of confit left for making duck rillettes (potted meat). My standard preparation calls for green peppercorns packed in water and fresh thyme (rillettes de canard au poivre vert et thyme frais). Last night's version, made at 11:30 after two glasses of Côtes du Rhône with dinner, begged for using ingredients at hand; a mix of dried white, pink, green and black peppercorns.
I used two forks to finely shred the meat and mash the fat.
After all the meat was finely shredded, everything went back into the frying pan with duck fat, I added ground peppercorns, mixed thoroughly and cooked for a few minutes.
Bad lighting in my kitchen produces lurid looking photos.
I didn't have enough duck fat leftover so I used extra virgin olive oil to top the ramekins. Additional fat keeps the rillettes moist, so don't skip this step to cut back on calories. Serve with toast points or with baguette bread smeared with Maille mustard and a few cornichons on the side. For a Californian take on a light lunch I would serve it with an orange and onion salad or a pear and arugula salad.
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