Barry Coalson: Hi! Welcome to Food Done Right. My name is Barry.
Jillian Coalson: My name is Jillian.
Barry Coalson: We're here today to show you how to make elaborate food look easy and simple to cook. Today, we're going to be cooking--
Jillian Coalson: Seared duck breast with Middle Eastern bulgur, a berry sauce, a broccolini, and we had a wonderful find and our market stand we have fresh little pomegranate that we're going to use to finish off our dish.
Barry Coalson: First, we're going to start with our bulgur because it takes about 25 to 35 minutes to cook. We're going to start by sautéing as white onion. The easiest way I find to cook a white onion, is by cutting up the ends and we're going to want to skin the onion. So I take your knife, run it down the side, scrap it with your thumb. Peel the onion, just a little there. Okay, first doing a small dice of an onion, slice down not all the way to the bottom and that way you are not --your onion stays together.
Jillian Coalson: It's the best way to keep your onion altogether, so you don't have little pieces all over your cutting board.
Barry Coalson: I'm going to cut the onion a half, place it around on its side and then we're going to slice it down again. That is it; it is ready to cut now. Now that we have gotten our pan hot, we're going to add the onions, so move this over here, slide down in there. We're going to sauté our onion, we're going to want a nice translucent color. Don't want too much color, don't want to burn them. While these sauté, we're going to go to Jillian. She is going to be making the berry sauce.
Jillian Coalson: Berry sauce is a very simple but yet an elegant way to dress up your duck breast. We have chosen today to use fresh strawberries as they were on sell at our local grocery store but you can also use frozen mix-berries that you can find in the freezer section of your grocery store. Easy part about that is you don't have all the cutting. So what you want to do with your strawberry is, if you just want to cut out the tops, slice them down the middle, into little pieces. They don't have to be perfect we're making a sauce out of them. And then all we're going to add is a little bit of sugar and some orange juice which is going to make your sauce a little bit lezzy.
Barry Coalson: Now that we have some color on our onions, they are more translucent, we're going to add the bulgur. Add one cup of bulgur, sauté that with the white onion. Now we're going to add chicken stock.
Jillian Coalson: Now we're going to take our sliced strawberries and put them in our sauce pan. We're going to go ahead and put it on the stove and we're just going to add a little bit of sugar and a little of orange juice. We can go ahead and put it on medium heat. We want our berries to cook down until they're very soft and almost unrecognizable.
Barry Coalson: Now, I'm going to show you how to clean a duck breast. How you could find it at the most specially produce stores. Duck breast is very fatty, we're going to want to clean most of that fat off and there is a little bit of silver skin on the back, we're also going to need it cut off.
So first, we're going to do that, just get your knife under there and peel it off. You want to square the duck off. Use the knife and peel the fat away from the side and just cut it down. So if there is any hanging over, just cut it off. So you're just left with the nice piece of fat in middle. Now we're going to score, and what that does is that it helps in rendering down the fat because you're going to cook most of this fat off, that way you're not ingesting lots of fat. Okay, and that's ready to cook, just need to season that very well and you can throw that in hot sauté pan.
Jillian Coalson: And as Barry is finishing trimming up the duck breast, getting ready to put on the stove. I'm just going to keep an eye on the bulgur, if it is looking as that the liquid is all evaporating but it's still kind of hard to the touch. You can go ahead and add some more chicken stock. There is no rule of thumb. For us here, this looks it's doing good, so we're going to leave it alone.
Barry Coalson: Little salt! Now the duck breast is very-very fatty, so we do not need any oil on the pan because as you'll see as soon as that sticks it in, a lot of oil, a lot of fat is going to come off the duck. A little bit on this side! So, duck is actually pretty good for you. What we want to do is we want to cook this to a medium rare to a medium; don't want to over cook duck because it will dry it out, you do not want it dry. Just let it sit in this pan for about 5 minutes, it takes to cook and cook off some of that fat. As soon as that fat's cooked of, on one side and it is nice golden brown, we're going to turn that over and sear it on the other side just for a minute and it'll be ready.
Jillian Coalson: This is our veg, hard to say, it is broccolini; it's actually a cross between broccoli and Chinese broccoli. It stems resemble asparagus in flavor and texture. All we're going to do to prepare this vegetable is we're going to cut about an inch, inch and a half of the bottoms, and then we have a pot of boiling water that's been salted on the stove. We're just going to go ahead and drop them in it, and we're going to do what is called blanching. It is going to blanch our vegetable, that'll just take a couple of minutes maybe 2 minutes.
Barry Coalson: You could see the nice color of the duck and we got it seared for a little bit, cook down the fat. Now we flip it over and let it cook for another 2 minutes and then we'll ready to go.
Jillian, mentioned blanching, what blenching is, is you take your vegetable, place it in boiling water and then once it's done, it's about done, you take it out and put it directly into an ice bath. An ice bath is just ice with water and that immediately stops the cooking and if you don't do this your vegetables will over cook. So we take the vegetables, put them in the ice bath and then we can reheat them and we're ready to eat them.
Jillian Coalson: Now that our bulgur is almost finished, we have just a little bit of moisture left in our pan, we want to add our raisins because we do want the raisins to soak up a good amount of the chicken stock. They're nice and soft. You can just add raisins to look, how many of them you think you want. I like to have a nice amount of raisins in there, so it gives it a nice sweetness.
Our bulgur is pretty much finished. You might want to taste it and see if it needs any salt or pepper. I did just add a little bit of pepper to it, as our chicken stock is a little salty, so we didn't need to add any additional salt with this. And I threw our broccolini back into the water to get it warm, so we are ready to plate.
A nice presentation for this dish sure to impress your dinner guests, just go ahead and put your bulgur in the middle of the dish, just lay your broccolini across the top, two or three pieces on each plate looks nice, and Barry is going to show you how to properly slice a duck breast.
Barry Coalson: It's very important that your meat rest after you cook it. When you sear meat, any kind of meat all the blood rushes to the middle and it's stays in middle, after you cook it and take it off and cut it right way. All that blood in the middle juices out everywhere, you lose a lot of your flavor that way. If you let it rest for 2 to 5 minutes, that blood that is all bound up in the middle because you got pushed away from the heat, seeps back out into the rest of the meat. So it makes your meat more juicy. So this is rested, good 2 to 5 minutes, we're going to just slice it on the bias, just means on an angle. And there you can see how juicy the duck actually is. We're going to take this, fan it out real nice and just move it over to the plate. Just put it right in front here, fan it out, nice presentation there. Now we're going to add the sauce.
Jillian Coalson: This is how your sauce should look when it's done. You just have some pieces of strawberry but it should have nice saucy glaze that is left from the orange juice and from the sugar. So I'm just go ahead and put it right on top, and we do have some of the fresh pomegranates seeds to finish off the dish. This completes our seared duck breast with Middle eastern bulgur, a broccolini and berry sauce. That's a fabulous meal, that's a very simple to do as you're seen but yet crowd pleaser and sure to please your guests.
Barry Coalson: Thanks for watching us. You can for full details and recipes; you can go to our website www.FoodDoneRight.com. I'm Barry.
Jillian Coalson: I'm Jillian.
Barry Coalson: Thanks for watching.
Jillian Coalson: Bye.
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