Duck a L'orange with Rice Pilaf

So what we’re going to do is turn the duck over and what I usually do is the wings, if you want to take it off you can take it off no problem. But since we’re not going to use the rest of the duck I'm only going to take off the legs. So I put the knife underneath, slice in the back and you only have a piece what they called the oyster. So pieces like a little maggot of the duck that you have it. You want to cut, turn your leg to sit down to the bone and then cut it off. And as you can see what I try to do I try to cut as close as possible to the leg. When you do this is you’ll see the duct. Now, again if you like the skin this is fine but the reason we cut so close is when you slice the duck’s breast the skin is nice and crispy, because you will see as soon you cook the duct, the skin always crisps up but it also shrinks and then you got a lot of the meat exposed. So take the duck leg, turn the duck over, get a little oyster there, take the leg. You got to twist the leg because in order to get the rest of it you want twist the leg and then cut your knife through. For the breast just follow the ribcage. In the front you have a little piece of wishbone here. You can see there, maybe it’s sticking out and then on the wishbone what you want to do is your knife is going to come down. I think a lot of people when they debone duck, they try to play too much with it and just put the knife down, let if follow down the ribcage. And then of course at this point we are not going to use the wings, so we’re going to go over the wing and just cut the breast off. This time with the legs. The legs obviously takes longer to cook now. I’d say the legs tales about four to five times the amount of time to cook in the oven, so we’re going to go ahead and get this here off first. We have a cinnamon here so what we’re going to do is we’re going to season it, again not traditional. Okay, a little bit of cinnamon, a little bit of salt and I'm going to go ahead and do some black pepper on both sides, cinnamon again. And the pepper and salt and then my oven here, I have an oven that’s right now at 400 degrees, so we’re going to go ahead and put these legs in, get them roasted and when I come back I’ll show you how we’re going to cook the breast, the vegetables and the walnut rice pilaf that we’re going to make. We’ll be right back. We have our rice pilaf. Now, rice pilaf, we’re going to actually cook it in the oven. What I'm going to do I have some butter here, so we’re going to start with the butter. I'm going to add a little bit butter and a little bit oil. So there and the butter – unsalted butter, salted butter it’s fine, it’s not a problem as long as it’s skim butter. I don’t know if there’s something like that but as long as you don’t use skim butter because like I always say butter and cream makes everything taste better. So what we got here, just melt a little bit, shallot, we’re going to put some shallots in here and a little bit garlic. Now, while this is heating up let me explain to you what I did with the walnuts. Two cups of walnuts here, basically the same walnut. These are the whole walnut, you can see they’re a little bit browner than these ones here. What we do is you roast them in the oven because – let me explain to you why you roast them. You roast them because the skin on the walnuts gives off a bitter taste so when you make your rice pilaf you’re going to eat it and you're going to have a little bitterness taste is because the skin of the walnut. So what we do is we take the walnut whole put them in the oven just 300 – 400 degree oven, be careful you put at 400 degrees real fast it’s going to toast. Toast them a little bit then you take them out and we would open while they’re hot and make sure you don’t burn yourself. While they’re hot, you will take the walnuts, put it in the towel and then actually take the walnuts and rub them and you’ll see that’s how to get the skin of the walnuts. And from there we will take the walnuts, shake it out and then we get the product, walnuts that’s basically peeled. Now, if you don’t want to go through this process, just buy unpeeled, we can buy everything today. Peeled, unsliced, sliced, whatever. Now, a good rice. A lot of people will go – a lot of people said “well you guys know how to do rice” I'm going to show you actually how to cook rice but they go “no we don’t know how to cook rice”. Sometimes it’s amazing, some people just put rice, water and boil it or salt and boil it. Now, this method is much nicer. The rice you really toast them, get a nice flavor and even when you bake in the oven it comes out much better. Ratio to this, chicken stock. Now if you want to use vegetable stock, it’s fine. If you want to use duck stock from the duck that we use that’s fine too. The ratio is usually one-fourth rice, two to two and a half part of chicken stock or water if you're going to use water. So what I'm going to do is put that in there, go ahead we’re going to dump all our walnuts in here right now. What’s going to be nice with this is the walnut actually sits with the rice. So when you take the rice and you flat the rice it’s going to be really, really good. And I'm also going to go ahead and season with salt. If you want to use black pepper it’s fine. White pepper works really, really good for this though. Here we go, let’s go ahead and add our chickens stock. And you see it’s so much easier when you get the rice and toast them off a little bit first with the butter and a shallot. It gives so much better. The way I measure it, I look at it and it’s usually almost about an inch or two to three quarters of inch of liquid above the rice and you're guaranteed this is going to work out fine. If not don’t sue me, okay. So we’re going to go ahead and put this in a 50-degree oven. If you want to do 400 degrees that’s fine too. Now, what I'm going to show you quickly I had some duck legs here that I put in a little bit earlier just so we can actually look at the process. You can see this has been cooking for a while. You can see it got a nice little glaze on them. This is just to speed it up because you know that shows like raw product, cooked product but actually what I want to show you here is I'm going to show you the difference between the other two that’s in the oven right now. All these here is the fat that drain from the duck. So a lot of people will go “it’s so fatty, it’s so icky”. Once this is done, the duck’s skin will be crispy and that’s the thing we’re going to make picking duck. Picking duck is a whole another process but all the skin will be real nice and crispy. It will be paper thin and all the fat will be reduce from it so very, very easy to do. I'm going to put it back in, again this will usually take anywhere from 30 and 40 minutes. So already, let’s get back to our duck breast here. Duck breast is easy. You can see sometimes with a duck breast sometimes it has a little stink in there, if you want to remove it you got to remove it. You have a little piece here which is basically just a tender, the duck tender and then like I said you can remove this piece. Best way to do this what we usually is insert your knife. Now, this is the tough piece, sometimes you got a piece of a duck and it’s really tough is because they didn’t take this in, just cut it off and that’s it and you discard it. The next thing we’ll do the vegetable. It’s very simple, we have some yellow summer squash here, we have green baby zucchinis, if you can’t get baby zucchinis you can use other. I got some fresh green peas and some carrots. The next thing we’re going to do we’re going to garnish the duck with the orange segments and I'm actually going to show how to make an orange segment and I'm also going to show you how we actually do the orange zest. Take a knife and you can use a chef knife for this too. Cut the ends off of the orange, put your knife in just where the line start, cut it down and just follow. As you see this piece right here, follow it down and it’s just very easy and that’s how you peel your orange and it comes real nice and clean and you don’t have to worry about mussing head or breaking pieces of it and that’s it. Now to do segments out of this, barely you can see the membrane, just put the knife in one side, turn it over and that’s it, just put it in, twist it and it comes right off. You’ll see this little pieces that’s more than others but that’s the way you go around and cut the whole orange until you have all your orange segments and after this cut you’ll have little pieces open like that, just take it and squeeze it and that’s the orange juice and you can leave your segments actually in the orange juice as well. All right folks the last but not the least we’re going to do the duck breast. Let me just quickly explain to you the duck breads. The pan that I have pretty large pan because we need to have them separated because you will have at least five duck breast. Now, if I see that’s five is not going to fit all in here obviously I'm not going to put them in because again like I explained it takes on the heat of the pan when you put too much duck breast it in it and then it start sweating and we really don’t want that. We want to sear it however this we’re not going to start searing at the very high temperature. What I'm looking for the duck breast is more like a medium heat. The reason being we’re going start them with the skin side down first. Now doing that we’re going to cut slowly cook up, so the skin really renders. The duck doesn’t cook all the way through but what happens with it, the skin really renders real nice and it gets real crispy so that what we’re looking for. So let’s go ahead, you can season the skin with salt and pepper. Now, this one I'm not going to do cinnamon. We’re going to sprinkle after we’re done but we’re just going to go ahead with regular salt and pepper. As such flip them over and very important always season the duck before you cook it that’s very, very important that you do that. So season all the duck and then like I said the pan – now the pan is dry, I'm not going to put any oil or anything in there. You can but a little bit if you want too, but I'm just going to start it with jus right heat, put them in there. Now if your pan is still hot, the skin will burn instantly, not burn but you will have a black. You can always take the skin off and throw the skin away so you don’t have to worry about it. See, there’s a good safe point here when you do this. All right. So put in that breast. All right. What I'm going to do is just leave the four duck breast in there because that’s more than enough, I don’t want to put more in it. What happens if I put too much in here it will start cooling the pan down and it won’t cook more like steaming the way that I actually cook it. So that’s what I'm doing here. Now we’re going to leave this, cook it for about I say a good eight minutes on medium heat and come back I'm going to show you when we flip it over. The skin is already is cooked down, it's kind of nice brown and crispy then were going to flip over the duck and finish it in the oven for maybe two minutes. The duck will cook really fast if you think about after the skin is rendered. Flip it over two minutes, the important part you have to let it rest. The duck always has to rest because if you don’t rest and resting means when it comes out of the oven you set aside. This is room temperature for about two to three minutes. You know as the blood releases back into the duck so when you slice it the blood doesn’t bleed everywhere so you have a nice medium duck bread. You can some of them the inside they cook really fast here and the skin, let me just show you where we are at right now. Let's review it right now. We want to go even more than that all right? So at this point I will turn the heat down just a little bit. All of them are more or less when you feel you touch it, it's hard getting crispy but we still have a good amount of fat in there so just keep on burning it and that’s why I said it cooks on this far so when you flip it over. Medium rare in two to three minutes that’s it, you take it out, we let it rest and that’s perfect. More that’s going our sauce. Now the sauce today like I explained before sometimes you know it comes from the duck leg. You have the roasted duck leg, you had your orange juice and you're sugar and everything. We do a separate linear. Then I go ahead and put some oil and usually you’ll feel a lot of times. Let me do this is always oil, shallots, garlic. You always say, is there anything to do it has shallots and garlic in it but you know it's just a good base to start. That’s a good base for flavor and that’s the reason why were doing this. Same principle on our garlic and the shallots here you do not want to burn them. We just want to sweat and again the thermal sweating, what were talking about is just basically when you cook it until it's soft and transparent. So medium heat that we have in here and then let's get our other ingredients ready. Our own segment is obviously going to come in last because we want to keep them cold. So what were going to do is were going to start with orange juice. I have some gran manier, if you don’t have gran manier if you have a puff that’s fine. It's a little bit more expensive of course but definitely good to use and then I have some white wine vinegar. You are going to ask why white wine vinegar, the reason for white wine vinegar is the acidity. The orange juice you know with the sugar we need to have enough sugar and acidity near too so to even out I'm just going to have my orange juice and have some of the sugar. Brown sugar. The reason why I use brown sugar again it gives a nicer flavor to the source that what actually what regular white granulated sugar would do. So now sugar and I'm going to put my vinegar in here. It's the back that I got, do you see how nicely pushed the duck is right now? Now the part that is smoking do not get nervous, there is nothing wrong when it's smoking like that. It's perfectly normal but you can do if you have a little bowl or fan, you can pour some of the fat just be careful. Always move with the goblet and usually we try to cool it off and then the goblets fall down to one side. You got oil over the place, so we’ll pour some of that off then were done and then flip them all over. So that’s it, see? And they are nice and they are crispy. This I'm going to put in my oven in about two three minutes and then were going to come back and show you how were going to slice the duck. Right now we should be ready and go ahead and pull that out and like I explained to you before. You want to pull it out and then you actually let it rest now I'm just going to go ahead and let it rest in the plate. If you want to keep it longer, the cook can obviously do that that’s not a problem. That’s going to be well done and was going to go ahead and say four minutes and like I explained to you. It kind of relaxes the meat and then the blood goes back into it. When I say the blood goes back into it what I mean is when you cook something the blood is always suppressed then it's all in the center. So you just take it in the oven then you slice then all the blood is everywhere. It doesn’t look medium rare, you know it's just not nice. So the rice pilaf that should be ready as well, we pull this out and you can look at that. Let me show you here why we do this is it's really nice and fluffy you see and the walnuts are all using it. The rice is kind of brownish to it but that’s what was looking for. You got the warm in the bottom and you don’t have a flavor here. Then let's have a look at our duck legs here. This is the duck legs, now again a lot of fat in this and then last minute I'm going to put it here in a sauce and finish up the sauce that we have right here. This pan what I want you to do is go ahead and pour off all the fat that we have in here and as you can see there is little particle in there that’s from the duck breast that’s roasted because that’s actually going to add more flavor onto the sauce that were going to do here. Sauce you can see the consistency is being reducing, so it gets a little bit thicker and then our shallots put in here and then were going to heat it up. You can see the starch bubbling like this, you can look over here so that slows the consistency of what you're looking for. If you want it thicker that’s fine we can get it thicker but we just want to get it to that point. All right, here we go, and we’ll flame it, is it going to be one of those? No, there we go. If you notice on the show it doesn’t flame, it doesn’t show you anything, let's try again all right? So what I'm going to do is put just a little bit of our sauce in here, swirl that around then we got good flavor here from the sauce. Were going to go ahead, put the duck legs in there and it's really going to give it a nice flavor since we haven't roasted in oranges anything we can just go get in here. The oranges we have in here, the last minute the reason why we added last minute, it helps. It's really nice and fresh. You can add a bit of thyme no problem, what I like to do is add a bit of mint because that gives you a really nice freshness to the dish. Vegetables but with oil again, we have a zucchini were going to put that in there. Be careful your pan is really hot and smoking hot and were trying to do a smoking hot but were just going to sear our carrots and that’s it and some squash. Now some of this we do in the restaurant so we do blanch our vegetables so that means we actually cook them in water only nice and dainty and crispy and then we actually convey them we shock them in ice water and then we cook them in there again in the pan. Now this one is very easy and you can almost say this is a stirred fried vegetables but no in a French way all right? We will just fry vegetable here. While that’s going, let's go ahead and look at our duck right here and actually cut a nice piece here. Let's take the nice big piece. Now you can see on the plate too already some of the juices is coming out so that’s why you just really want to relax and don’t start actually cut the duck when the juice it comes out. You have a choice, cut it this way I like to turn it over because sometimes it's harder to cut through the crispy skin. It is not nice and fresh all right, so hold it down. Use the whole length of the knife and cut it nice. Our saucer we have right there going with the duck. What I want to do is well is were going to add a oil segments here the last minute like I explained to you we want to add it right on the last minute so that way it stays in one piece and it's not little chunks broken all over the dug rest. Dig this then turn over and as you can see nice medium rare here and the color so it's not just in the center but it's everywhere where it's nice and medium rare. We will just a little bit of salt again. Now for the orange segment, were going to add all of this to the duck. You can smell it; you know anybody can do this at home to. This is very, very easy, very simple to do. The walnuts the reason for that nice crunch, nice crunchy texture that we have in here, it helps when we try with this. This is my favorite part actually. I don’t care about the vegetable; I don’t care about any of the rice. I think it's the duck that really gets me going. We’ll spread some of that over there. Now this is what I came in like I said, you know the salad; I love the doing the salad it's really, really good here. And then we’ll take our duck breast and just do it one piece and we’ll place it on here.