Chez Murillo: Duck night

Duck breast with cherry-port sauce, glazed carrots, and duck-fat potatoes

The first time we cooked duck breast, we did it sous-vide style after being inspired by watching Hung on Top Chef. The recipe we used (from another Blogger!) produced the most tender, perfectly cooked duck I've ever had. The flavors are loosely based on duck a l'orange, but the highlight is the sous-vide method of cooking. However, as much as I loved the texture of the duck, I'm not that crazy about orange flavors in general, and prefer a sweeter, berry-based sauce that I've had at some restaurants. A quick search on Epicurious later, and I have found this recipe for Duck Breast with Cherries and Port Sauce.

Initially, I wanted to do sous-vide and just do the sauce from the recipe, however since Uly had to work a bit on Saturday, figure it'll be easier to just pan-sear it as instructed by this new recipe. Whenever we cook, Uly is usually the one who cooks the main protein, while I do sauces, sides, dessert, etc. so I was kinda scared of messing up the duck. So I just did all the prep and waited for him to get home before doing the main portion of the cooking. I gotta admit though, I definitely missed Uly when I was chopping up the shallots, since I suck at chopping onions and start crying every 10 seconds...Uly has mad knife skills and can chop onions like no other!

While waiting for Uly, I also started working on the sides. I figure some potatoes as our starch and some baby carrots for our vegetable. My initial plan was to just throw everything in a roasting pan with some olive oil and/or duck fat, but then got inspired earlier in the day while watching Avec Eric on PBS. I was a bit skeptical about putting cumin and cayenne on the carrots, afraid that they would be totally overpowered by the spices, but alas, I am just too weak to resist this silver fox (you should have seen me drooling like a fangirl at Le Bernardin). Mesmerized by his French accent, I decided to follow his recipe for glazed carrots, which he also paired with duck, but I stuck to my guns for the sauce. It actually wound up going perfectly with the Epicurious duck recipe, since the mildly spiced carrots were a good contrast to the sweet sauce, and the cumin did not overwhelm as I had initially feared. Merci Eric!

I figure I'll continue the duck theme with the potatoes and use this recipe for potatoes roasted in duck fat. I've made it before for a dinner party and I liked it a lot then...Uly thinks it's too rich though and tastes more like fried potatoes than roasted potatoes. I guess with the sweeter, richer sauce, I can see why the duck fat would be a little overboard. Maybe next time, I'll try something lighter and maybe more savory/herb-y for more contrast with the sweet sauce. Or maybe some truffles. :)

Since this was another duck-themed dinner, we had some (duck) foie gras for our first course. We usually like to buy a whole lobe of foie gras and then slice it up, vacuum-seal it, and freeze it, so we had some handy. However, I saw that the baggie was labeled April 2008! I figured it can't hurt to give it a try, we could always dump it if it was bad (though it would have broken my heart to throw out some foie). Good thing it was still good, and you couldn't tell it's been in our freezer for a year in a half! Gotta love that vacuum sealer! We even used the same cherry-port sauce for our duck breast and it also went perfectly with the foie gras.

For our wine, we started out with the 2006 Goldeneye Pinot Noir from Duckhorn (you see we definitely went overboard with the duck theme here). It was definitely very impressive, and I think I found one of my new favorites! I know people are supposed to like Pinot for their subtlety, but I really liked the more powerful style of this one. We followed up with a 2005 Warm Lake Estate Pinot (Niagara) that we got from our trip to New York. This one was lighter and more subtle, but I guess I just like bigger, more fruit-forward wines so this was a bit anticlimactic after the GoldenEye.

But of course, I can't have a fancy meal without some cheese. We still had some leftover Stilton, and Manchego from our Spanish party, so I picked up some soft cheese at Milk Pail. I had high hopes for the Rouzaire Brie with Truffles, expecting it to taste somewhat like Brillat-Savarin with truffles but it wasn't even close. I was pretty disappointed with the lack of truffle-y taste and the brie itself was just kinda blah in general. I guess I won't be buying that one again.

I probably blew out all my points for the week in this one meal, but it was definitely worth it. I still have the other duck breast in my freezer though keep posted for that meal!

Here are some more pics below of our duck dinner: