Northern Chinese · Main
Beijing Kaoya
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a sweet edge rounding the corners.
Ingredients
- 1 whole duck, about 2.4 kg
- 2 L boiling water
- 60 g maltose
- 60 ml rice vinegar
- 20 ml Shaoxing wine
- 10 g fine sea salt
- 16 Mandarin pancakes
- 90 g sweet bean sauce
- 6 spring onions, in 7 cm batons
- 1 cucumber (about 250 g), in batons
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Dry the duck inside and out and salt the cavity. Working through the neck opening, ease your fingers, or the nozzle of a bicycle pump, between the skin and the breast until the skin lifts away in a balloon, then tie the neck skin shut.
- Hold the duck over the sink and ladle the boiling water over every part of the skin, turning as you go, until it tightens, turns opaque and the pores close.
- Warm the maltose with the vinegar and wine until it pours, brush the whole skin twice, and stand the duck on a rack in the fridge, uncovered, for 24 hours. It is ready when the skin is taut and papery and taps like a drum. 600 min
- Roast breast up on a rack above a tray of water at 200C (400F) for 30 minutes, then drop to 170C (340F) for 45 minutes to 55 minutes, until the skin is mahogany and hard to the tap and the thigh reads 78C (172F). 30 min
- Rest 10 minutes, steaming the pancakes in their stack for 5 minutes while it rests. Carve the skin off first in coin sized pieces while it is at its crispest, then the meat, and serve with the pancakes kept covered at the table, the sweet bean sauce, spring onion and cucumber. 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.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
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.
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