Peruvian · Main

Arroz con Pato a la Chiclayana

Intermediate
45 min
roughly 3 of 4 for cost

earthy · aromatic · sweet-edged · warm-spiced Leads with an earthy, grounding base, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.

Ingredients

4 duck legs (about 1 kg)
10 g fine sea salt
4 g ground cumin
60 g ají amarillo paste
1 red onion (about 180 g), finely diced
6 cloves garlic, minced
330 ml dark beer
120 g coriander, leaves and stems, blended with 150 ml water
400 g long grain rice
200 ml chicken stock
120 g frozen peas
100 g red pepper, in 1 cm strips
3 g black pepper, ground

The skills inside

Frying the paste until the oil splits Salted water & the float test

Allergen screen

Found: gluten · alcohol

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

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Method

Pick a casserole wide enough to take the rice later, because the legs and the rice cook in the same pan. Sit the salted legs in it skin down while it is still cold and dry, set it over low heat, and give them 15 minutes to shed their fat and colour before you turn them to seal the flesh side. Lift them out. 15 min
Pour off all but 40 ml of the fat. Cook the onion, garlic, cumin and ají amarillo paste in it, stirring, until the paste darkens and the oil around it turns orange, about 8 minutes. 8 min
Return the legs, pour in the beer, scrape the base clean, cover and hold at a low simmer for 1 hour 15 minutes, until the meat gives at the bone. Lift the legs out and keep them warm. 60 min
Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. Add the coriander purée to the braising liquid and make the total up to 760 ml with as much of the stock as it takes. Bring it to a hard boil, rain in the rice with the pepper strips and black pepper, cover, and cook 18 minutes without once lifting the lid. 18 min
Fork the peas through, sit the legs back on top, and let it stand covered off the heat for 10 minutes. 10 min

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes

It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.

Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.

Salted water & the float test 188 recipes

The water was salted before anything went in, and tasting it confirms it: seasoned on the tongue, with the salt dissolved rather than sitting on the pot floor.
There is enough water, hot enough, that the pot returns to its boil quickly after the food goes in and never stops moving.
Where the dish uses the float as its signal, the signal is obeyed: the pieces rise and they come out then, not several minutes later once something else was finished.
Nothing is stuck to the bottom of the pot or welded to itself, and the water has not thickened into a cloudy sludge.
Drained on a bite rather than on the clock: resistance at the centre, with no chalky raw core.

Where it goes wrong The pot was too small and the water unsalted, so it never recovered its boil: the food sat in slack water, went gummy at the surface, and comes out bland in a way that no sauce afterwards can fix.

At the Table

The Pour: Pinot Noir (the classic)
Also Right: Cru Beaujolais (Morgon)
From the Taps: Belgian dubbel
Zero-Proof: Black cherry spritz

Acid and silk against duck fat: the oldest marriage in Burgundy, with Gamay as its cheerful younger witness.

Family notes

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Arroz con Pato a la Chiclayana Technique: Risotto methodThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Peruvian kitchen