Will It Be Sous Vide? Plump and Juicy Duck Breast
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’sWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column where I do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
Last week we confetted the duck legs, and now we lift the bird up to the breastfeeding birds and give them the old treatment in a hot bath. Of course, duck breasts are very different cuts of meat than legs, so we’ll take a slightly different approach.
Cooking sous vide duck breasts is nothing new. Both Food Lab and ChefSteps cooked a chicken chest this way and got very tasty results, but they do it a little differently. ChefSteps evaluates and prefires the skin – to shorten the final firing time at the end – then prepares the breasts in a 136-degree bath for an hour and a half. Food Lab skips scoring and pre-frying, but allows the salted breast to hang in the refrigerator overnight to draw out some moisture and concentrate the flavor. These “extra duck” breasts are then cooked in the bath for 2 hours at 130 ℉. (I skipped the overnight drying step, mainly because I never had the patience to do it.)
Six degrees may sound small, but it can make a big difference when the meat is “cooked”. I was also not sure if scoring and pre-firing would affect the crispness of the skin that much, so I cooked several different breasts in a few different ways.
First I salted the breasts, then – with the sharpest and thinnest blade – I slightly cut the skin on one of the breasts, trying not to cut myself into the meat.
Then I pre-fried the notched breast until the skin was very light golden brown and the flesh was lightly colored.
Both duck boobs then went into some kind of little pouches where they hung out for an hour and a half at 136 ℉ because ChefSteps seemed very confident in its temperature and you need to start somewhere.
After their allotted time in the bath, I took them out for a final crisp. As Kenji points out in his recipe, the duck skin is quite thick and insulates the meat from further cooking. As you can see in the photos below, both skins are crispy, which is very nice.
The pre-fried breast had a plump look and I liked the way the marks looked, but there was no difference in the taste or texture of the meat or skin.
The 136 degrees bath cooked the breasts to the ideal environment. They were juicy and tender, not chewy at all, with a strong duck flavor – although I skipped the drying step during the night – but I wanted to see if we could make the skins even crisper . Based on Food Lab’s sous vide turkey breast recipe , I decided to try skinning the meat and frying it myself after it had done its job of providing all that wonderful fat while cooking the meat. I also wanted to try the lower temperature because – although the medium breasts were flawless – I enjoy eating meat, which is as rare as polite society would allow.
So I salted two more breasts and hammered them in – I just love how the grades look to be honest – and put them in the bathtub for two hours at 130. After they had served their time in bags, I took them off and using fingers and a very sharp knife, carefully rolled and cut the skin from the meat, trying not to carry away the tasty duck meat.
Then, while the breasts were resting, I fried both sides of the freed skin, resulting in a very crisp, almost crunchy skin.
I then served a very crunchy piece of duck skin along with a very juicy medium-rare breast and it sparked a lot of joy. As for the temperature, you have to choose, I would say that it is a matter of personal preference. As you’d expect, the lower cooking temperature resulted in a rarer piece of meat that was softer and more pliable than its medium-rare counterpart, with a bit more chewiness.
So now we have to ask the most beloved question of all? Will there be sous vide duck breast?
Then answer? Oh yes, damn it.
Look, I can cook duck breast in a skillet, but that always comes with dangers, as they can be easily overcooked if you tend to be distracted (and I am very easily distracted). In addition, they are quite expensive, so spoiling them is especially difficult. No matter what temperature you prefer here, the Immersion Circulator gives you complete control over the result, resulting in juicy and juicy breasts cooked flawlessly from edge to edge, no matter how exhausted and forgetful you are. Pair that with a super crunchy piece of duck skin for a light and delicious piece of duck that will amaze anyone lucky enough to be your dinner companion. (Or you could just keep the whole duck to yourself. I think you deserve it.)