Come On, Throw the Duck on the Grill
The duck has a reputation for being fussy, and I blame the French. I’m sick of french (a way of preparing and cooking duck). All this talk about separating the breast from the legs and cooking each separately, the breast carefully cooked to perfect medium rare while the legs are dug in and configured in even more duck fat, which often has to be mined in addition to the duck. It’s enough to delay cooking the bird, but it doesn’t have to be (in French). You can toss a whole duck straight onto the grill, and there’s little you can do to keep it from being delicious.
I’m not the only one who gets sick of frenchies (the way duck is prepared and prepared). Writing for the New Yorker , food writer Helen Rosner also questions our Francophile obsession with “two paces, one bird”:
Rare breast with well-done legs is a very French take on duck. Like so much else in the culinary world, the French way of thinking isn’t bad , but it’s so big that it leaves little oxygen for everything else. Peking duck has a sparse breast? Is there a duck in Portuguese arroz de pato ? Crispy pieces of Thai salad? The tender mauve inside of a French-cooked breast is certainly lovely, but too many cooks’ apparent fear of going over the line to medium or (God forbid) medium means the skin can’t get fully crispy and the bird meat comes out. magnificent. the subcutaneous lipid layer remains uncomfortably lumpy rather than silky. Why, besides tradition and Francophilia, do we even bother with this?
Rosner makes a good point. Why bother with something fussy and French when you can be cool and cold and carefree (and anything but French)? Rosner then comes up with a slow-cooked duck recipe for casual but sumptuous dinners, which got me thinking: Couldn’t I do the same on my Weber kettle?
Of course I could. A charcoal grill is essentially an oven that draws heat from charcoal, and I have had great success slow roasting birds with it in the past. But, unlike most of my endeavors, I didn’t feel like making my favorite charcoal snake. I wanted it to be as lazy and simple as possible, partly to “tie in” with my French (well, Acadian) ancestors, but mostly to push the boundaries of how sloppy duck preparation can be.
My first attempt was wildly sloppy, but not unsuccessful. I piled a pile of hot coals on one side of the grill, set duck (in dry brine) on the other side, closed the lid, and watched the grill get too hot, though I limited the airflow by closing the vents to mere wood chips. I wish I could say I controlled the temperature, but it was a chaotic day filled with flaws, so the temperature fluctuated wildly throughout the cooking process, never stabilizing at the 200℉ I was aiming for. The meat itself heated up to 200℉ in one place, and you know what? Everything turned out well!
As a result, I got a very edible, quite juicy duck. Part of the breast was a bit dry in places, but 80% of the breast was incredibly juicy, and even the drier pieces were tender and delicious, especially when eaten with a silky layer of melted fat and a crispy crust.
But aside from the bird, which was very tasty – a bird that I would have proudly served if anyone else was around – the real prize was knowing that I can be a complete duck and still get an impressive and delicious main course. This is due to the extremely fatty nature of the bird – its curse (the thick layer of subcutaneous fat that takes forever to break down) is also its blessing (what allows you to “digest” the bird and still get it tasty). ).
I was ready to try again and improve my imperfect method when my refrigerator broke down. It was endlessly difficult to fix this according to my protection plan. The part never arrived, and Home Depot eventually gave me the money, but that was after two months of working with a mini-fridge, and you can’t dry a whole duck in brine in a mini-fridge.
It didn’t matter much. The long break between ducks didn’t mess up my process anyway, because the recipe wasn’t that complicated to begin with, and breaking the slight degree of concentration I had didn’t affect the result. This was great news because, again, I wanted a duck recipe that could make the most absent-minded and easily distracted of us (me).
This is exactly the recipe I wanted, and this is the recipe I got. It requires exactly two ingredients – duck and salt – and can be cooked on a charcoal grill without any fancy equipment except for a dual-sensor thermometer to check the temperature of the grill and meat (and you still need to have one of those). ). It is juicy, juicy, oily and quite oily. It’s decadent and visceral, and best consumed cooked, with very little pomp and circumstance, preferably by hand. That’s how my boyfriend and I ate it (while watching a Fulci movie), straight off the cutting board, with lots of napkins and a few cans of Diet Coke. (My boyfriend has called him a “tame duck” ever since and asked him to be part of our regular rotation.)
Light Grilled Duck (also known as Hand Duck)
Ingredients:
- 1 whole duck, head and tail removed
- Kosher salt
Cut excess fat and skin off the duck – flexible pieces. Save the fat for rendering and the skin for crisp . Salt the duck inside and out. I used five three-finger pinches of kosher salt to create a shiny, but not crusty, layer of salt on the bird. Place the duck on a wire rack set inside a baking sheet and let it dry in brine in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours, preferably 48 if you have time.
When the duck is salted, pierce it with something sharp and sharp, or make diagonal cuts in the skin above the breast, being careful not to cut the meat.
Place a thermometer with a probe on the side of the grill facing the duck. Get a large coal chimney lit with more coal. As soon as the coals at the top start to sizzle around the edges, dump them on the other side of the grill, close the lid and adjust the vents so that the airflow is very low. On my Weber kettle, this means the bottom vents open about a quarter and the top vents open just a tiny bit. Let the temperature stabilize and drop. When it reaches 350℉, put on the weft. Let the temperature continue to drop until it stabilizes somewhere between 200℉ and 300℉, and keep it in that range by adjusting the vents if needed (more open means more airflow means a hotter grill). Don’t try to be too precise. It really doesn’t matter.
Let the duck cook for an hour, then turn it breast side down. Cook for another hour and turn over again. Cook for half an hour, then flip again, then continue to cook and flip every half hour until the internal temperature of the breast reaches 180℉. Remove from grill and let stand until cool enough to handle, then eat, preferably with your hands.