A water bath is not really ‘small’, so perhaps that could be a loophole in your moratorium . Farmers in rural southwest France would find themselves with an abundance of meat at the various points in the year when animals were slaughtered—more meat than they could hope to eat before it turned. It certainly is! Best regards! The cooking time and temperature were perfect as the meat was tender and succulent. This sealed the meat against the air, preventing spoilage. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Sous vide duck confit presents one conundrum here that I need to acknowledge. Thanks for the comment. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! If you are looking for other inspiring sous-vide recipes, then check these recipes below: In each case, we prepared one batch traditionally and made a second batch by cooking the meat sous-vide … Funnily enough my amateur attempt has had more ‘views’ than anything else – 900 people have looked for and found an amateur attempt at crispy peking duck! Or do you mean something else? Instead of using those or frozen liquids, you can of course also buy a chamber vacuum sealer, but those are big and expensive. Duck confit that won't ever end up studded with shards of glass, like mine. To make duck leg confit the traditional way, you need quite a bit of duck fat. I do a little of both. This small amount of duck fat is easy to obtain from cooking duck breasts, and like CampariGirl said it has a better flavor. But that long cook also killed any microorganisms lurking on or in the flesh, because that's what heat does when given enough time. Learn more on our Terms of Use page. Just easier to obtain. Because I have little skin in the sous vide game, believe me when I tell you that it's quite possibly the best way to cook duck confit. Use a retort bag instead. The confit method of cooking a meat, such as duck, was originally all about preservation. It is possible to make duck legs tender with sous-vide at lower temperatures (i.e. I'll take a piece of roasted lamb with a range of doneness levels over one with a micro-thin browned band surrounding a soulless, perfectly even medium-rare slab—a texture I find freakishly similar to that of crème brûlée—any day of the week. All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Apart from using much less duck fat, the advantage is also that temperature control is very easy. For the dry brine for 1kg of rock salt or sea salt I use 30 gr of salpeter or sodium nitrate, 50 gr sugar, 1 pulverized bay leave , 1 tsp of pepper and a dash of cloves. None of which involve shards of glass—guaranteed. Yes, you can use a sous-vide machine for this confit potatoes recipe. It takes me at least 12 hours, in many water bath, to remove the salt. We all agreed that the duck that had been cured in the vacuum bag for 24 hours was the silkiest of the bunch, but—and I can't stress this enough—the difference was so subtle, almost verging on imperceptible, that I can't rule out the possibility that it was due to variations in the duck legs themselves. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. ( Log Out /  And a lot of duck. Not only does it make an exceptional version of the dish, it's far easier than the traditional method, requiring not an ounce of rendered fat. That gives us unprecedented control over the meat's texture. The result was very tender flaky duck meat with crispy skin. Because the duck legs are vacuum-sealed, there's little to no air in each bag. *Coming Thursday – I try Modernist Cuisine’s Pressure Cooker Garlic Confit in canning jars. I cook mine for 10 hours at 155, then broil skin side up: http://goo.gl/XidJIe, Thanks for sharing this! The duck skin is frozen solid in a bath of liquid nitrogen, which leaves it very brittle. Nice post, Stefan, and the timing could not be more perfect. That sounds very nice. When not working on, thinking about, cooking and eating food, he blows off steam (and calories) as an instructor of capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art. Learn how your comment data is processed. Then I sealed them into a vacuum pouch again, with a tablespoon of duck fat for each of the legs. I’ll have to check that out! For both white and red an aged wine would work better than a young wine. It can be gently rewarmed, then pulled from the bone, shredded, and blended with some of the rendered fat to make rillettes, or broiled or baked in a hot oven until the skin is browned and crispy, then served a million different ways. They were quite good actually, the salt just overpowered the duck taste a bit. Their solution was to start by curing the meat with a generous amount of salt, along with seasonings like thyme and garlic, allowing the salt to draw out moisture and lower the meat's water activity. I admire your open admissions regarding the seasoning. I'd be remiss here if I didn't mention the work of Paula Wolfert, both for popularizing the technique of making confit in the United States and for being generations ahead of most other cooks on the advantages of sous vide cooking. Based on taste tests run by Nathan Myhrvold and his Modernist Cuisine team, this appears to be the case: “We performed this experiment with duck confit and pork carnitas. Try a 2-3 hour purge in cool water and let them rest overnight before proceeding so the brine equalizes. To prepare the duck breasts, set the Sous Vide Professional to 135°F (57°C), with the rear pump flow switch closed and the front flow switch set to fully open. I would like to see the pictures. We never made confit because of the effort involved…but this is much more manageable…. Heat a dry cast iron skillet, over medium-high heat and place the leg in the pan, skin side down for 6 minutes. Rather than mastering the classic interpretation, the recipe in Modernist Cuisine flips it on its head by focusing on refining the flavors of a roasted bird and applying Modernist techniques. Recipes and tips fried in Claried Butter, 1 year StefanGourmet.com Cuisine recommendation of using 18 % weight... Of pressure cookers use wet ingredients blog and receive notifications of new posts by.. Meat in its own rendered fat and slowly cook it over very heat! 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