This Whole Duck Recipe Is Perfectly Imperfect
The New York Times
Roasting a duck isn’t much harder than preparing a chicken, and makes for a festive holiday meal.
Cooking duck at home is a classic example of when my quest for perfection undermines the “tasty enough.”
For years, I strove to create the idealized vision of roast duck that I held in my head. It had to have crackling, burnished skin as crisp as a potato chip, and ruby-hued breast meat as rare as steak and dripping with schmaltz-glossed juices.
The best way to come close to this was through a technique I learned from Ariane Daguin, the founder of D’Artagnan, a gourmet food purveyor specializing in duck. First, I’d roast the duck until the breast was a rosy 130 degrees. Then, I’d pull the steaming bird out of the pan and hold it by the drumsticks to lop off its legs, which returned to the oven to finishing cooking while the breast rested.
