All Things Chill

Mushroom Duxelle Stuffed Muscovy Duck Roulade with Batonnet Carrots and French Cut Haricot Verts Sauteed in Duck Fat.

Large “before” and “after” pictures from Flickr. More pictures from yesterday here (Thanks Jacqui!).

I made dinner for Jacqui and Clint! Hee hee. Tons of fun. It’s honestly a sample of how much I’ve learned in culinary school. To start, I de-boned a whole duck (from Whole Foods) using an 8” chef’s knife and saved the scraps for a future duck stock. To tell you the truth, it was very difficult to learn how to cut a whole bird without wasting 1/2 of the meat (which I did the first time). But it’s like riding a bike: If you learn on one model (say, a chicken), you can ride them all (duck, turkey, Cornish game hen… etc.)!

So after I made the entire duck boneless, I then minced a ton of mushrooms, shallots and garlic and sauteed them in a pan with a couple tablespoons of butter. After the liquid in the veggies dissolved, I added a little white wine to brighten the mixture and added breadcrumbs and goat cheese Pecorino to tighten up the stuffing. When the duxelle (that’s what it’s called) cooled, I placed the mixture in the middle of the de-boned duck, rolled it up, trussed it with butcher’s twine and seared all the sides on a super-hot hot hot pan. There’s a LOT of fat in duck breast… so I had to make sure to give the skin and fat a healthy head-start to get crispy before I put it in the oven.

When I pulled it out of the oven, I sliced it into little rounds (that’s roulade in French) and sauteed them a little further to get a nice crust on top. I served the rounds with cut carrots and green beans that I blanched (cooked them 5/6 of the way) and then coated in duck fat in a hot pan. Serve!

I was really happy how it turned out… I just wish I had leftovers.

~Spec

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 7:18 am and is filed under Cooking Culture, Cuisine, Culinary School, Streaming Conciousness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.