ad hoc at home #7 and #8: duck

I don't think I'm alone in finding duck an intimidating poultry to cook at home, although really for no good reason. I blame the markets, for not carrying more duck meat, and then charging an arm and a leg for it. This means that if you are to try it, you mustn't go wrong, or else you'll have wasted quite an expensive piece of meat. This is where Thomas Keller comes in. His cookbook ad hoc at home has proven so far that I can't go wrong with his recipes.

Before shopping, I studied the recipes for both the duck confit and the pan-roasted duck breasts. I noticed two things: first, the duck confit required lots of duck fat, and second, the pan-roasted duck breasts produce lots of duck fat that is then discarded. Ding! went the light bulb in my head. I'll make the duck breast first, strain and save the fat, and then use it in my duck confit. Since duck fat keeps and duck confit is a two-day process (in fact, it can be stored for even longer), I didn't have to worry about being all duck'd out. It was a brilliant plan.

First, the duck breast recipe. It introduced me to the concept of cooking almost entirely skin-side down, something I've since executed on salmon (per America's Test Kitchen recipe) and chicken thighs (Jacques Pepin recipe) as well, for a perfectly crisp skin. Every instruction in the book is helpful and accurate, down to the removal of the "small white tendon that runs through each tenderloin" of your duck breast and setting "a metal bowl or other container near the stove" for use later. Don't question it, just do it, and everything will turn out right.

As with so many of his recipes, the cooling rack is key. Nearly everything is better after having been cooled on a rack.

The duck breasts came out beautifully.

I served it on a bed of simply sauteed green cabbage, sort of a la Keller's recipe, using, what else, duck fat, but without all of the trimmings (no red cabbage or pistachios).


Now for the duck confit. Keller's recipe makes 8 duck legs, and after trying to do it for 2 duck legs only, I can see why. Duck fat isn't easy to come by for most of us, and it's a bit of a waste of the duck fat if you're not lining at least the entire bottom of your Dutch oven with duck. It would be less of a problem if I had a smaller Dutch oven, but for the size I had, I probably could have fit 4-6 duck legs in one layer.

My thoughts on the duck fat: You can always buy it directly from a good butcher, but why pay separately when you already have to pay for a good amount of it when you buy your breasts and legs. From the duck breast, I had rendered off maybe one-third of the fat called for by the recipe for the duck confit. The recipe also calls for trimming and discarding the excess skin and fat from the duck legs, so I rendered that off, too, yielding almost the same amount as I already had from the duck breasts. In total, I had enough fat to immerse about 2/3 of the duck legs in the fat, but not all of it, as prescribed. Here's where my cooking sense and willingness to edit came in handy. I felt it was enough, and guess what? It was enough.

The duck went into the oven before I went to bed, and came out of the oven in the morning, about 8 hours later. Keller says 8-10 hours, but I opted for 8 since I only had 2 legs. It came out just a little more "meltingly tender" than I think he is aiming for, since one of the legs did fall apart a little when I sauteed them later. I think 8 hours would have been perfect for 4-6 legs. It was delicious, nonetheless.

Even though duck confit is meant to be salty, and I for one love salt, I would heed his warning about over-salting. It came out a bit on the salty side, which I was able to balance out with tomatoes and roasted potatoes, but had I indulged my penchant for salt by adding just a little more than the recipe prescribes, which I often do, I could have easily ruined these beautiful duck legs.

ad hoc at home #6: shortbread cookies

Pure joy can be created from 4 simple ingredients: butter, sugar, vanilla and flour.

Who knew?

If you've ever eaten at French Laundry, you've walked away with some of those light golden buttery crumbly cookies cut into perfect little rectangles. Well, with a stand mixer and some parchment paper, it's easier than pie to make (I know the saying is easy as pie, but pie is not this easy to make).

The ingredients: 1.75 sticks (or 14 tbs) unsalted butter; 0.5 cup granulated sugar + extra to sprinkle over cookies; 1 tsp vanilla paste or extract; 2 cups AP flour.

The dough: Using the paddle mixer, mix butter and sugar on low to combine, and then beat at medium speed for ~3 minutes until creamy. Add vanilla, and then on add flour on lowest speed. Once all the flour is in, beat on medium until dough begins to cling to the paddle and no longer looks dry, but before it forms a solid mass. Transfer dough to a board and bring it together with your hands. Form the dough into a roughly rectangle shape, wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes, and up to several days.

Forming the cookie: Roll the refrigerated dough between two pieces of parchment paper until it's 0.25-inches thin. Set aside the top parchment, and cut the dough into 2-inch squares. Cover again with the top parchment and refrigerate again for ~15 minutes until cookies are firm enough to remove from the parchment.

Baking: Position oven racks in lower and upper thirds of the oven, and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove top sheet of parchment, and arrange cookies 1-inch apart on two cookie sheets lined with parchment paper or Silpats. Sprinkle cookies with sugar, and bake for 11-12 minutes, until their edges are just starting to turn golden brown. Allow cookies to cool a few minutes on the baking sheet before transferring onto a rack to cool completely.
After making the cookies a few times, I decided to take the cookie one step farther: dipped in chocolate.

Technically, to create a shiny, hard chocolate coating for the cookies, you have to "temper" it. Well, tempering technically requires bringing chocolate to a certain temperature, then cooling to a certain temperature, etc., and I don't cook with thermometers, not yet anyway. So I looked for shortcuts, and this is what I came up with:

For a single batch of cookies, you just need 5-6 ounces of good quality semisweet chocolate (you can use bittersweet chocolate, too, but for me, it wasn't sweet enough to stand up to the cookie's flavor). I chopped the chocolate into large pieces, and transferred approximately 2/3 of it to a medium-sized glass bowl. The glass bowl went over a small pot of simmering water. I added a teaspoon of shortening (I read somewhere that shortening added to melting chocolate stabilizes the end product and lends a sheen, although I haven't yet tested what happens if you don't add it), and stirred the chocolate around slowly until melted. I then added the rest of the chocolate, which I think achieves the cooling part of the tempering process, and continued stirring until it was all melted.

Then I removed the bowl of chocolate, and started dipping. I placed the dipped cookies on parchment paper to cool.

This yields enough melted chocolate to allow easy dipping in a bowl, but this means you have plenty to spare. You could theoretically use even less chocolate, but then the chocolate coats the bowl and will be quite shallow making it difficult to dip the cookie.

Allow the chocolate dipped cookies to cool in the refrigerator until the chocolate hardens, which I found takes at least 45 minutes.

Needless to say, these chocolate-dipped versions were very well received.