If you need one good reason to buy a duck, besides being tasty, sustainable and low impact happy meat, this is it. Duck fat. Liquid gold! Think potatoes. Fried golden crispy potatoes done in the oven or in a pan. Think the best potatoes you'll ever taste. Dont think of your arteries. This fat imparts an incredibly rich and rounded flavour to the potatoes, not at all greasy nor 'ducky'.
Duck fat is very easy to render out from duck skin. Just put chopped duck skin and excess fat trimmed from the bird in a pan and shallow fry on a medium heat for about 20 minutes. All the fat will render out from the skin and leave you with molten gold in a pan as well as lots of 'quackling'; crispy duck skin fried in its own fat. Oh my god. It all sounds soooo bad for you!
When the skin pieces hit a deep brown and become really crispy, remove them and then drain the slightly cooled fat through a sieve into a storage container and refridgerate. It keeps well for quite a few months and can probably be frozen. While youre rendering out the fat, you may as well stick the duck carcass in big pot with some of those vegetable trimmings that you stash in a bag in the freezer and some seasoning and make stock, right?
So heres what you can get from a duck:
:: a meal for 4 using the meat (2 legs, one breast)
:: one duck breast proscuitto, enough for 8
:: enough duck fat for roast potatoes for 8
:: 6-8 litres of duck stock
:: quackling
An amazing amount of goodness from a small bird. The boybean was quite partial to a bit of quackling, having discovered them for himself when he climbed up to the benchtop. He must have eaten, ohh about ten of these tasty morsels before i intervened. The crispy rendered duck bum i fed to the cat.
8 comments:
I took one look at the title and the lead photo and immediately thought "Please tell me that's not a photo of her urine". Thank God for duck fat ;-)
PS. I'm now going to order some free range duck with my Christmas pork! Yum.
This can only be good for you! :)
Good for the boy bean. He's being brought up well. Teehee... Watch out, soon he'll break into the pantry while nobody's watching, to take bites out of your salami. :)
Julie, wise decision. :)
You Guys just "Quack" me up.
I havent had duck for years, must go get me some ...Yum
Wombat
Lucky By Bean, Lucky Cat...!!!
I adore duck, just adore it. In fact John and I are having a Thai style Duck Salad for dinner tonight...yum...!!!
On a slightly different note...
We have a large number of paw paw ripening at a great rate. Fortunately we like them as a fresh fruit but our limit will be reached in the not to distant future.
I have two cut and in the dehydrator as I write but wondered if you or your knowledgeable followers have any ideas Kel..??
Same goes for self sown mini-Roma tomatoes...we have had a bumper Winter crop from just one plant that self seeded. We thought it would be fun to see what it would do. Ha, we have had over 500 of the buggers. I pick up a handful every time I pass them.
Any & all ideas much appreciated...!!!
Oops, that would be Boy Bean...didn't proof read...blush*
Ha, my word veri is "plate" very appropriate for you.
Hi Kelly
I must admit that my first thought when seeing the photo was something akin to Julie's!
I love duck, but no-one else here will eat it, except for the two cats...
You are right, though, a very sustainable meat, with so many uses. I've been boiling practically any bones we get with some onions, carrots, celery and herbs to make stock. I also throw in any fat, then after the stock is strained and cooled, take the fat off the top and put it aside for soap making. The stock gets frozen if I'm not using it immediately.
And that quackling looks simply delicious! Maybe I need to give the duck a go again and not tell them ;). xx
julie- oh my, you had me rolling around laughing with that! you know, it never crossed my mind, now Im empted to do another post!...duck for xmas- great idea!
veggie- he had left over rabbit pie for dinner last night...
wombat- quack quack
kerrie- hmm not much expereince with paw paw.. frozen slush? and tomaotoes id be tempted to make a roast them and then make a sauce!
naturewitch- good luck hiding the duck! sorry for the scare i seem to have provided y'all with.lol soap, now thats an idea, never thought of using duck fat for that.
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