Recipe corner: 61-hour duck breast

I first became aware of the concept of brining meat for a short period when I saw Nigella, wearing some sort of silky dressing gown if I remember correctly, immersing a turkey in a bucket of salt water.  The overnight bath was said to improve both the flavour and texture of this sometimes maligned bird.  I have never done this myself (we don't tend to have turkey at Christmas) but I think my brother has.  Anyway, the point is, it is the first time that the concept of a short, sharp brine flickered on the radar, as opposed to the longer process that is undertaken for cured meats such as corned beef.

Short and sharp it may be, but it still has a massive impact on texture and flavour.  We had brined duck breast when we went to Restarant Joro in Sheffield and couldn't believe the difference it made.  And duck breast is good anyway so imagine doing something to it, relatively low effort, that makes it even better.  I would definitely urge you to try this.

You need to start preparing your duck 61 hours before you want to eat - hence the recipe title.  But be assured the amount of work you need to do is minimal so it requires more organisation than it does effort.

The flavours in our brine, and the subsequent rub, tend a little towards the Orient - so chosen to suit the accompaniments - but you could definitely switch this up a bit.  The ratio of salt and sugar to water is what is important here - D spent quite a lot of time researching brine solutions to ensure that he got this bit right.  

Ingredients

500ml water

75g salt

25g sugar

2 star anise

5 allspice berries

5 juniper berries

2 garlic cloves (unpeeled but bruised)

Bayleaf

Tbsp coriander seeds

Tbsp black peppercorns

1/2 teaspoon Chinese five spice

2 duck breasts (skin on)

Make the brine: but all the ingredients in a large pot, bring to the boil (stirring, if necessary, to ensure that the salt and sugar are fully dissolved) then allow to cool.

Place the duck in a suitable container (ideally one with a lid, otherwise you will need to make sure it is well covered with clingfilm or similar) and pour over the cooled brine.  Place the duck in the fridge for 48 hours.

Now (and this is important if you want a properly crisped skin), 13 hours before you intend to eat it, remove from the brine, dry with kitchen paper and place uncovered in the fridge.  This will dry out the meat.

1 hour before dinner, remove the duck from the fridge and allow to come to room temperature before cooking.

Rub a small amount - approx 1/4 tsp - of Chinese five spice in the flesh of the duck and then season both sides well with salt and pepper.

We have found that the best way to cook duck is to preheat the oven to 180 and then place it, skin side down in a cold pan over a medium heat.  As the duck begins to cook it will start to render its own fat.  The timings will depend somewhat on the size of your breasts and the heat of your hob, but after 5-7 minutes you should be able to see that the skin is getting golden and crispy.  Follow your instincts here - you want to get the skin perfect before putting it in the oven.

Flip the breast so it is now skin side up and place in the oven.  Again, the timings will massively depend on the thickness and the oven but here, there is no need for instinct - for a perfectly blushing pink duck breast you are aiming to get the internal temperature to 52.  If you don't have a meat probe then a) buy one and b) try giving it a prod after, again 5-7 minutes.  The texture should be nice and springy.

Serve with whatsoever you desire (but check out our anniversary dinner post for our most recent iteration).

An engagement anniversary dinner

12 June was eleven years to the day when D and I got engaged.  I've just looked back to see if I blogged it, but it turns out that I started blogging the following year so, a setting of the scene first.

It was a very warm evening.  We had drinks at Gordon's on The Embankment and then walked down The Mall towards Belgravia and our dinner destination: Restaurant Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley hotel.  It's called "Marcus" now; it was re-branded a few years after we went to make it more relaxed and, to be fair, I do recall it being a little on the starchy side when we were there.  Great food though.  About halfway through - definitely after the starters but, I think, before the main course, D did the whole getting down on one knee thing, much to the delight of the women at the table next to us.  I noticed, however, that he waited until a waiter was approaching the table to ensure (as he told me afterwards) that we got stuff.  Reader, as a plan it worked; not only did we get a congratulatory dessert, but I was taken to the kitchen at the end to meet Marcus Wareing himself, who signed a menu now framed on our dining room wall.  We don't really do photographs in this house - we don't even have any wedding photos- but we do have that, and the wedding breakfast menu that my lovely brother and sister in law got signed and framed for us, and the memories they invoke are precious.

Obviously there is no eating out at the moment so we cooked something a little bit special instead.

To start - a large canape more than anything else - roasted new potato halves topped with sour cream and "caviar".  I think I've mentioned these before but it's worth saying again that these are such a nice way to kick off a special occasion.  The potatoes were tossed in a little oil and seasoning and roasted, cut side down, for 45 minutes and allowed to cool slightly.  Meanwhile, I combined sour cream with some finely chopped shallot, lemon juice, dill and a hint of mustard and piled it on top along with the fish roe.  Of course, the potatoes, rather like the more typically used blini, would also be suitable for any sort of similar topping.

For a main course - 61 hour brined duck breast (recipe to follow) mashed potato flavoured with green chilli and coriander chutney  (gorgeous combo, slightly peculiar colour), plum sauce (painted in somewhat clumsy stripes across the plate) and, finally, some lovely pickled plums with ginger and chilli.  I'm just going to come out and say it - we felt pretty smug eating this.

And further smugness ensued when I served dessert - baked cheesecake pots.  Baked cheesecake is a great favourite of D's and, of course, everything looks cute served in a pot.  I just quartered a standard baked cheesecake recipe to make this (which does make it quite a hefty portion but...we're greedy!) and it turned out beyootifully.  I was so pleased.  

Not quite Marcus Wareing standard, then, but not bad.  And we ate it while watching episodes of Taskmaster which is one advantage the home dining room has over that of The Berkeley.  A lot has changed in eleven years but some fundamentals stay the same, even in the midst of a global pandemic: love, friendship, food.  

Blog admin

This poor old blog has been a little bit neglected of late so I have started doing a little bit of tidying up and sorting out and updating.  The Eating Out page now, finally, stretches past 2017.

I have also added a couple of pages  On the first, foodie shopping bookmarks, I have started putting together a list of some of the online resources that we use when we have cash to flash.  Some of these will be local to Leeds but they will be marked so it is obvious.  Lockdown has made us even more reliant on deliveries than usual and lots of places, local and national, big and small, have really come through.  Just last night we enjoyed a bread and cheese supper courtesy of the very wonderful George and Joseph and Bluebird Bakery.  The latter does the nicest sourdough that, I think, I have ever had,

Just below that we have a recipe bookmark page.  This is an opportunity for me to bring together and share fantastic recipes from around the Internet.  Everything I list on here I have cooked myself and think the recipe can be trusted.  If I change something extensively, I will likely post it myself in which case it will continue to appear on the standard blog Recipe Index.  But I've always been a little bit wary of just typing up other people's recipes for the blog and this feels like a more sensible way of doing it.

I'll add dishes as and when they occur to me, but for starters there is a gorgeous basic wholemeal loaf, a storecupboard pasta dish, a mushroom curry that tastes far more than the sum of its parts and the very cake that led to my recent minor meltdown.

Happy cooking everyone!

Recipe corner: a basic template for houmous

It's been an up and down few weeks since I last posted.  In reality, very little has changed.  Our household (me, D, the cat) remain much as before the lockdown in the UK started lifting.  Because we are in the very fortunate position that we can both work full time from home, and have pretty much been able to get all shopping delivered throughout, we have decided to keep more or less to ourselves for the foreseeable.  Although the world has become very small, some days - most days - that feels OK.  I miss my extended family and I miss my work colleagues and I miss sitting in a bar with a pint and a packet of Scampi Fries, but the longer this goes on, the more "life before" takes on a certain dream-like quality.

But there are down moments.  I was broken by cake a couple of weeks ago.  It was good cake too - Nigella's Clementine Cake which is usually pretty foolproof but, on this occasion, because I was trying to deal with it alongside cooking something else, I rushed and it didn't come out of the tin properly; I ended up with half cake, half crumbs.  Such a small thing but I had a proper, screaming tantrum.  And then, for the next few days, found myself bursting into tears at random intervals.  To be clear, I don't think this was really about cake (and, in retrospect, it may have had a lot to do with hormones) but it made it obvious that I'm not 100% OK.  I don't think anyone in the world is 100% OK at the moment.  The fact that I'm OK an awful lot of the time puts me among the very, very luckiest of people.

Anyway, I post the below recipe more for my future reference than anything else - but if you are a houmous fan and have never made it yourself then I think it is well worth it if you happen to have a decent little food processor handy.  The secret to the perfectly whipped texture is, of course, the liquid that the chickpeas were cooked (or canned) in.  I came quite late to this realisation and had all but given up making it before I found out because I only ever produced an oily, claggy disappointment of a mess.  It's taken me a few goes to get the proportions quite right but I think that I'm there now - so I record it for posterity.  

This recipe produces, to my mind, the perfect basic houmous.  All the flavours are in harmony, nothing is too strident.  Once you have that you can play around with your flavours. I didn't weigh out exactly how much this produced, but in terms of volume was probably about the equivalent of the size of standard pot you buy in a supermarket.  Precise, eh?

Note: A true aficionado will probably:

a) remove the skin from the chickpeas before blitzing but, I'm going to be honest, I am not that person.  The results without removing the skin are perfect for my unrefined palate and

b) shudder in horror at the prospect of "flavoured" houmous.  But again, I am not that person.  Caramelised onion houmous is my particular favourite - and it goes beautifully with cheese.  So there.

Ingredients

50g dried chickpeas, soaked in cold water overnight

1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/2 fat clove of garlic, finely grated or crushed

3 tsp lemon juice

2 tsp tahini

Tsp sea salt (or, a generous pinch if you don't tend to measure such things)

NB: if you are using tinned chickpeas, this amount dried equates to about half a drained tin.  Simmer them gently in the can liquid for 10 mins or so to soften slightly and then proceed per the recipe.  Then buy some dried chickpeas and try it that way next time - you'll never go back!

This is barely a recipe but...

Drain the soaked chickpeas and then put them in a large saucepan, add enough water to cover them by about a centimetre, add the bicarb and bring to a boil over a medium heat.

Boil until soft - by which I mean it will crush easily, with minimal pressure, between your thumb and index finger.  The timings will depend on your chickpeas - I gave my last lot just half an hour, but it can take longer.  Keep the water topped up to roughly a centimetre or so over the pulses throughout and skim off any of the grungy looking foam that rises to the top.

When cooked - drain RESERVING THE COOKING WATER.

Put the chickpeas in a little processor - nothing else initially - and blend to a coarse paste.  You then want to add enough of the cooking water to create a perfect texture - and should do this gradually, a tablespoon at a time.  I have found that my optimum texture comes from between 5 and 7 tablespoons of liquid.  What I would suggest is take it down to ever-so-slightly too thick (for me, I would check at 3 or

4 tablespoons).  Then add the other ingredients so you can gauge what effect these have.  And only then finish adding enough water to get it to where you need it to be. Remember, it may vary as it is partly dependent on how much liquid the chickpeas have absorbed during soaking and cooking.

Now you have your basic houmous you can go mad!  Drizzle with olive oil and strew with pomegranate seeds!  Whack up the garlic!  Throw something entirely incongruous (like, say, caramelised onion chutney that needs using up) in there.  Have fun.  And eat smeared on pitta, or toast, or just with a spoon.

With love to all of you out there who are not quite OK.  Rather like the weather today, things remain changeable and sometimes rather gloomy, but the sun, always, inevitably, indubitably, comes out in the end.