OK, you haven’t had this dish for decades – it’s so seventies, no?
The other night, a couple cooked this dish on MKR and I thought about it for the first time in decades. I checked the MKR recipe but the sauce had 1001 ingredients so I jumped on the web to check alternatives.
source: www.Everyrecipe.com.au
Eventually I came up with my own simple version of this dish, but as usual when I’m busy in the kitchen I forget to take a photo. In essence, you squeeze some orange juice into a small pot or pan, heat it up and add some sugar or honey so that the sauce caramelizes as it reduces slowly. So far, so good, but we have nothing more than a sweet sauce at this point so we’ll have to add some substance.
The good thing is that you can do this gradually, while you keep tasting as you slowly reduce the sauce. I gradually added:
- Some thin strips of orange peel with the pitch removed
- A dash of red wine
- A dash of balsamic reduction
- Two teaspoons of caramelized onion jam
- Two teaspoons of marmalade (I used Lime, which was all I had)
- Handful of finely chopped shallots
- Half a cup of chicken stock
I’ve had mixed success with duck, following recipes that suggest frying or roasting Marylands for half an hour. When you do that, the duck will not be cooked through but dried out. The best way to cook duck Marylands is as a confit, which means cooking them in duck fat very slowly. That’s what I did today but I didn’t have that much time so I browned the duck pieces for a few minutes in a pan, then cooked them submerged in duck fat for an hour and ten minutes in the oven at 360 degrees.
I chucked in a few pickling onions (spring onions have been hard to find) and some sliced potatoes as well. You can use the duck fat a number of times since it’s very stable (just put it back in the container it came in once it’s cooled down a little).
The potatoes got a bit soggy and needed some time in the fry pan once I poured the fat off. I poured the sauce over the duck pieces, added the fried potatoes and some steamed green beans, and chose a 2013 Massale Pinot Noir that I recommended 18 months ago – I got that one right.
Kim