Experimenting with Chinese duck

I reckon my stir-fry bitter gourd (or bitter melon or 苦瓜), cooked with sliced pork and black bean sauce, looks nicer, but I'll talk about my experiments with cooking duck the Chinese style.

New Zealand may be too duck friendly. We see ducks everywhere, by the city waterfront, in botanical garden ponds, by the sea, in the lakes and wetlands. After all, it had been a country of birds with no land mammals for millions of years. Until the European settlers came and flooded the isolated island with sheep and cows.

The Kiwis love admiring their ducks, I supposed (well, I too can't stop taking pictures of them). But so much so that it doesn't seem to feature on their platter. I search high and low for duck meat in their supermarkets, but only found chicken and turkey. It's a big crisis, as how am I able to hone my Chinese and French culinary skills without knowing how to cook their famous duck stews or comfits.

Thankfully, the Asians came to the rescue, and I finally bought a big fat and oily Chinese duck home. Made 2 Chinese duck dishes out of it over 2 dinners with leftovers for next meal. Yum yum. Also learned in the process that duck meat is best stewed as long as possible.

First recipe, Duck Soup with Salted Vegetables, is a Teochew dish, from "Reviving Local Dialect Cuisines" by Pang Nyuk Yoon. I felt that I could have simmer longer than an hour for a tenderer meat. I didn't take any photo, was busy savouring the soup.

Duck Soup with Salted Vegetables
1/2 duck
salted vegetables (kiam chye, which is preserved mustard)
2-3 tomatoes
3 dried tamarind slices (assam)
Water
3 slices galangal
2 salted plums
salt and pepper

Rinse duck and chop into large chunks. Remove as much fats as you can -- trust me, the duck is verrrrry OILY. Cook in boiling water for about 10 minutes. Remove to drain (I omitted this step, hmmm...maybe it helps to remove oil).

If using dried assam slices, soak in water until soft. I used assam paste, so not necessary. Cut salted vegetables and tomatoes in large chunky pieces.

Pour water or stock into pot. Add duck and everything else except tomatoes and seasoning. Bring to boil and simmer over low heat for about an hour or more, until the duck meat is tender. Add tomatoes. Depending on the saltiness of the salted vegetables, season duck soup accordingly.



The above Duck Stew with Black Sauce was inspired by Enda's delicious duck stews. She used to cook this duck dish with very thick, dark, sweet and spicy sauce. So I got her to tell me how she did it before coming to New Zealand. But it didn't turn out as I had imagined, as I wasn't sure what kind of dark sauce she used. I ended up using a mixture of dark sweet sauce (kecap manis) and dark soy sauce.

The stew is done, first by stir-frying about 2 large onions and a few slices of galangal. Add the duck pieces, followed by whatever dark sauce. Followed by water to cover and simmer for hours until tender. I used my newly bought slow cooker and stewed the duck for some 6 hours. Very nice. Remove surface oil with a lader if it doesn't appeal to you.

And as we had some leftover egg noodles from lunch, we mixed them with the duck stew. Side dish was the bitter gourd stir fry.

Mission when I go back to Singapore: get the right duck stew recipe from Enda.
Another mission: Improve my photography skills of Chinese dishes.