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:


Place setting


Searing the duck breast


Foie gras with cherry-port sauce


The duck


Duck-fat roasted potatoes


Glazed carrots


Goldeneye Pinot Noir 2006


Cheeses (clockwise from left: Manchego, Stilton, Rouzaire Brie w/ truffles)

Crêpes

Crepe filling ingredients

Since we got our new crepe pan, Uly and I have been determined to learn to make our own crêpes. The first time we made it, I used this recipe from Epicurious, which worked really well for the sweet crêpes, but was too sweet for the savory crêpe.

This time, I switched to Alton Brown's recipe, which gives variations for both sweet and savory crêpes. It was ok but I think the first recipe was better, especially for the sweet crêpes. I gotta admit...I messed up majorly and forgot to add the melted butter, but the batter still seemed too thick in general. Next time, I think I'll try the recipe from Cook's Illustrated, which has more liquid than Alton Brown's recipe, but a bit less than the Epicurious recipe. I guess Uly and I have a long way to go before we become crêpe experts.

We made 3 kinds of savory crêpes:


Ham, egg & cheese - This is a classic French savory crêpe. I like it better than just the ham/cheese I made the first time, the egg definitely makes it more savory. I put more cheese than last time which made it better, but I think I still prefer the sharper taste of Gruyèreto the Emmentaler cheese we used today. This was probably the best savory crêpe of today's bunch though.





Spinach & mushroom - I've had some version of this at crêperies. I added some white truffle oil to the sauteed mushrooms, but didn't really taste it, I think my truffle oil is too old and lost most of its truffle aroma. I really like the flavor we got from drizzling the basil oil on top, I think next time I'll add some basil and make a light pesto. It was really good, but one thing that was sorely missing is some MEAT! I think I"ll add some chicken next time.





Bacon, egg & cheese - I usually love everything with bacon, but the biggest surprise of all was that the bacon crêpe didn't taste as god as the ham crêpe. It was still good, but I never thought that ham (or any other food) could ever beat out bacon in anything...there's a first for everything I guess.




Since the peach season is almost over, we also decided to take advantage of remaining fresh peaches around and make Bellinis! I just pureed some white peaches (gotta love my immersion blender) and added some prosecco. We got a great deal on Nino Franco "Rustico" Prosecco at World Market, it's usually a $15 or so bottle but they had a 50% off sale. I gotta say this prosecco is definitely a cut above some cheaper brands that I've bought. The drink turned out well, but I think I put too much puree so it turned out a tad too pulpy. Surprisingly, I think the frozen purees from Whole foods work out better, I think it's because the texture is a bit finer than my own homemade puree. I'm still aspiring to make it as good as they do in Bouchon Las Vegas, they still have the best Bellini I've tried. This is still much better than a Mimosa though!




After we finished the savory crêpes, went back to cooking our sweet dessert crêpes, since we didn't want the crêpes to sit for too long. We had 2 different crêpes, mainly because I don't eat fruit, and Uly doesn't eat chocolate:



Strawberry & banana - This was Uly's dessert crêpe. He put a little too much batter this time so it didn't turn out as thin and crisp as the others. It was better the last time he made it (probably because of the better crepe recipe) but it wasn't bad. Because of this, it turned out a little messy...definitely not one of our picture-perfect dishes.






Nutella - I don't really like fruit (unless it's part of an alcoholic beverage, so I decided I'll do another classic, the Nutella crêpe. Good thing we have plenty of this stuff in the lab so I borrowed some to use this weekend. It was really easy and worked out really well...I definitely need to get my own jar of this stuff...it's awesome!




Well, that was our crêpe adventure of the day...I think we probably need several more tries before we can perfect our technique and recipe enough that we can serve this to other people for brunch. I think we're getting there...