Will It Be Sous Vide? Hearty and Meaty Duck Confit
Hello everyone and welcome to the rich and informativeWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column where I do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
Finally , we must eat the duck. (I mean, I think I should eat the duck. You can see the pictures of the ducks.) That was a long time ago. While duck confit technically won our topic selection session a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t find the duck legs in time to post this week, so I bought a whole frozen duck and made an alligator while I waited for it to melt. I wasn’t really mad about that.
But now this confit should have its own moment. Before we get to the ducks, let’s talk a little about confit as a cooking method: while prized for its tasty and juicy results, it was originally prized as a preservation method. First, the meat is dried, which gives it flavor, but also removes water that is good for microbes. The legs are then slowly cooked in their own fat, and then buried in the same fat, which acts as an insulator from air and moisture. The only step in this process that we are changing here is the second, replacing the slow cooking in the low temperature oven with an even slower cooking in the souvid bath set at or even lower.
So first, the medicine. You can cure your feet with a little salt and pepper, but I like to use the mixture below, which I learned in a duck lesson I took at the Portland Meat Collective (enough for eight feet):
- 8 bay leaves
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 tablespoon black pepper
- 6 cardamom pods
- 2 pods of star anise
- 4 tablespoons coarse sea salt
- 6 cloves chopped garlic
- 2 shallots, chopped
- 8 sprigs of thyme without leaves
- Zest of 2 lemons
I toasted the spices and then crushed everything into a delicious paste before spreading it on the legs, then covered the tasty scales with plastic and left them in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Then I washed off the spices, blotted dry and prepared them for the bath. None of the sous vide duck confit recipes I found online required extra duck fat in the bag, but the whole point of the confit is to dip them in as much fat as possible, so I added a couple tablespoons duck fat into one of the bags, covering the meat side with as much fat as possible.
I then wrapped the other leg in her own skin to see if it could store enough fat on its own.
Both bags were immersed in a 170-degree bath, where they remained overnight (for a total of 12 hours). After they slept sous-vide, I took one leg out of the bag (the one without excess fat).
To get that tidy, clean-looking bone that you see in the picture above, I simply “froze” my leg before cooking, and it sounded a lot dirtier than it actually is. You just need to cut through the skin and tendons just below the joint with an ultra-sharp knife. The skin shrinks during cooking, it will move towards the meat, leaving behind a beautiful and clean section of bone.
I then toasted this yummy little meat in a super hot skillet, splattering in the process and cursing the world. (Don’t blame the duck. It’s on me. Only idiots fry a bird in a T-shirt.)
Anyway. As you can see, the skins are nicely browned and it’s time to knead them into chops.
It was good, but not particularly better than any duck confit I cooked in the oven. It was drenched in drug flavor – it tasted almost like duck ham – but the texture was slightly less intense than what I was used to. However, it is important to note that for real duck confit it is useful to cool a little in its own fat, sometimes for three whole weeks. I obviously didn’t have that much time, but I could at least give the other leg (the one cooked with the extra fat) a motel fridge overnight.
The next day, I scraped off all the wonderful fat and collagen, setting them aside for other use, and fried the leg in a hot skillet.
Considering the leg was cold and tough due to being in the refrigerator, it was a little more difficult to manipulate in the pan, but it gave me more time to light it while the meat heats up again.
I also didn’t flip my leg over or wrap the skin around the meat, so it was a little more difficult to get a good browning of the entire skin. This made the leg look a little more crippled, but optics are not our main concern here.
I liked this leg much more than the first one. He had a richer, greasy mouthfeel, and some of the scent from the treatment was softened by the extra time in the fat. It was delicious as hell.
So, duck confit sous vide?
Answer? Yes, and that’s very good. It’s also very easy and convenient, no oven to watch, which is nice especially if you’ve never confitated anything before and are worried about digestion. Based on everything I’ve learned from the above, I would recommend that you prepare your confit sous vide like this:
- Heal your feet within 24 hours by adding a little salt and pepper or fragrances.
- Do French legs for a visually appealing presentation worthy of a restaurant.
- Brush a couple tablespoons of duck fat on the side of the meat and wrap the excess skin around it. Wrapping will make it easier to grill the leg as it comes out of the bags, so you get a crispy crust all around it.
- Su-vid at the price of 170 ℉ for 12 hours.
- Remove the bags from the sous-vide tub, then chill in the refrigerator for as long as you can, up to three weeks. The longer you immerse your legs in fat, the tastier they will be, but even overnight my legs have changed.
- When you’re ready to cook them, scrape off the fat as much as possible and fry them in a hot skillet until the skin is crispy.
When the legs are nice and crispy, let them rest for a couple of minutes and then eat. I would recommend fully cooking all sides before trying the duck. The first time I made duck confit the whole world collapsed and I ended up eating two legs in a row while standing over the sink.