Roast Duck: Study #1

I looooove duck. It's like the filet mignon of poultry. The best is at a nice restaurant when they cook it medium rare. Mmm. Around the holidays when I saw a full frozen duck (I don't recall seeing one around before) I snatched it up. It's been hanging out in the freezer since then. Last weekend I finally had a day and evening free to roast it. I read up about methods, times, temps etc. There were lots of recipes that claimed 'perfect crispy skin!' but none had time x temp instructions. What is up with that? Not every duck is the same poundage. Should one really roast them all for the same amount of time? I saw times from 1 hour to 3 hours. My mind was boggling. So I decided to use my chicken equation.

Let's talk about a few ways ducks differ from chickens. They have very thick, fatty skin. I repeatedly saw (during my duck internet search) to pierce the skin but not the meat before roasting. This seemed weird to me until I actually saw the duck's skin. Another thing was to cook it on a rack because it is so fatty. I like fat, but this is very fatty and having the duck sit in a pool of grease doesn't make the skin very nice to eat.  They tend to have more pin feathers remaining on their skin so sometimes need grooming. The next one I didn't read anywhere: ducks are tough to carve and more difficult to strip (the carcass) than chickens. They also have weird skinny arms and a long fatty neck flap of skin. They are generally larger and floppier than chickens. I'm very scientific right?

I bought a $6 roasting rack on Amazon in preparation for this guy.

I used a wooden toothpick to pierce the skin at an angle. It was hard! Ducks are tough birds! Literally! Thick skin, tight stiff joints. I used a light sprinkling of Slap Ya Mama and that was it. For my first time roasting a duck I wanted to get a feel of what the meat tasted like on it's own and just go simple.

I prepared some pearl onions to go in the roaster with the duck. These turned out amazingly. They were a pain to clean and created a lot of waste for how small they were, but yum!

Here is little ducky all trussed and ready to go. I had to truss because the legs just splayed out otherwise. Don't those red potatoes and pearl onions look pretty?

And here it is dunzo. While I thought it was very good, it was also somewhat unremarkable. Probably because of the way I cooked it. I watched the internal temp (taking him out at 175°F) so it wasn't dry at all. I look forward to trying another method for crispier skin or adding other flavors. I'd say this was a successful first try though! Plus I ended up with a duck carcass for stock and lots of great duck fat for a future dish!