Chef Sean MacDonald Cooks Duck Breast

[Music] today I'm going to be taking a little bit behind the scenes and showing you how we prepare duck breasts in the restaurant [Music] you are a very specific way tested this duck over the course of many years of cooking and this is my favorite way to prepare it that we get the best results we get our ducks in whole and fresh I mean you don't want to get the breast it's kind of like cryovac tin waterlogged because then there's excess water inside the fat and inside the skin leaving you a lesser result see there was a competition I did once culinary competition and what happened was I got my duck breast in cryovac bags I asked for them to be fresh and whole but I just was in Milan Italy for like a world competition which kind of sucked but I thought that it would happen so I brought blow dryers and I had my commies my helpers blow-dry the duck for the first like three hours of the competition I only had like four hours so I had them blow-dry it just to like dry off the skin as much as possible so you get the best crispiest result it was unfortunate but that happens sometimes you have to go with the flow so we get the Ducks in we brine them first so that's a sugar in a salt solution that flavors the meat and it seasons it as well as you can see it's a little bit discolored it's a little bit darker but that's because we smoked it and we dip it in a master stock which is like a flavorful broth that's like salty and sweet that does it that initially seizes up the skin gets a little bit moisture out of the skin from boiling it like you would if you were to boil meat kind of makes things more dry it makes the skin seize up I get tight around it and then that helps for the drying process then we hang it to drive three weeks we usually dry a dress for about four weeks on the crown it makes the skin go extra crispy and crunchy you can just feel it pop and the texture in your mouth and it makes it tender and flavorful all right so here we have our breasts so as you can see it's a little bit darker in color from the master stop dipping and it's also really dry tenderloin still on it and then you as you can see underneath do we have that bright pink color and the fat so the fats dried out of the duck so what we do is we take off the tenderloin [Music] the silver skin here so we're just hard off I'm gonna make sure that your wrap your duck is tempered you don't want to cook it from cold that way it'll cook more evenly so we're gonna cook it from like room temperature and it's gonna come up all together all perfectly but my favorite kind of pan to cook duck in I find that makes the crispy skin and the better best result is a cast-iron pan you don't actually put any fat in the bottom of it you just let the fat render out from the skin so we're gonna put it on and we're gonna put it on full so we're gonna get this cast iron like ripping hot until it's like pretty much like smoking I like to put it in this way because it makes the skin crisp up and seize up and start that initial cook makes the skin extra crispy I find personally there's a little bit of sugar in the brine and in the master stock dipping so if you aren't careful you can get it to Carm eyes and the skin can look a little bit burnt but it's just the sugar is caramelizing so you have to be very careful when you do this that you don't cook it on high for too long as you can see we're smoking a little bit now let's take it off of the heat completely like that and then I'm just gonna put it in the pan and press it so there's no fat in the pan I'm just using and waiting for the fat to render out of the skin just cook like this and we press it so it cooks evenly and it makes a flat skin duck so now that we've you can see some of the fats rendering out the sizzling we're gonna turn our burner to the low and then we're just gonna let it go slowly so usually you'd render the duck breast a lot longer to get that layer of fat to shrink and to and to cook it up and make the skin crispy but but because we've dry is it a lot of that moisture in the fat and then the skin has come out so we're gonna get crispy skin and we don't have to cook it for as long also the fat will kind of be like almost like prosciutto fat so it's like season that's flavorful but it's also like nice and tender this is our as you can see once we flip it over the breast is getting nice and golden brown and it's flat and nice beautiful so we're gonna keep cooking it out like this you see the fat bubbling right there that's like the perfect temperature really low all right so now we're almost there golden-brown it's name perfectly-cooked around here crispy skin we're gonna take it we're just gonna sear these sides a little bit and then we're gonna flip it back some garlic and some herbs they were to add our butter sure wants the milk solids and the fat eat up it's actually going to caramelize the skin and make it an even better golden-brown color and then we're just gonna base the duck there's flow of heat coming all around the duck now we're going to take the duck off correct all right so now we have our duck breast here it's been rested cooked a perfect anymore Thanks now we're gonna slice into the duck as you can see there's all that juicy fat right there been out of that pocket there beautiful duck breasts nice flavorful perfectly cooked through I'm gonna do a little muck banging for you now show off the duck maybe it'll sound hmm so good it's like perfectly cooked crispy skin beautiful that's our duck here at East restaurant so now you know how to make it don't tell anybody keep the secret very low-key don't want to pass that off to too many people thanks for watching you recording up to the camera at camera what up mom love you Wow are you shirtless you're always shirtless for a different different different dish obviously [Music]

Channel: Sean MacDonald

Views: 9,390

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Id: t6xJP9rXpgs

Length: 7min 10sec (430 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2020