The French Basque & Gascony · Starter
Foie Gras de Canard Poêlé au Verjus
- Advanced
- 15 min
- roughly 4 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 4 slices of raw duck foie gras, 2 cm thick, about 70 g each, cut from a chilled deveined lobe
- fine salt and coarsely cracked black pepper
- 80 ml verjus
- 15 ml Armagnac
- 60 ml duck or chicken stock
- 4 slices of brioche, toasted
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesSearing: the hard crustDry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts
The words inside
Foie Gras: Torchon, Mi-Cuit & Ethics of Service
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · 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
- Cut the slices with a knife dipped in hot water and wiped, then lay them on a cold plate and return them to the fridge until the pan is ready.
- Heat a dry heavy pan until a flicked drop of water skitters and vanishes, and season the slices only as they leave the fridge.
- Sear 45 to 60 seconds a side without moving them, until a lacquered brown crust has formed and the slice yields under a fingertip but is still cool at its centre; lift onto warm plates.
- Pour off all but a spoonful of the fat, deglaze off the heat with the verjus and Armagnac, add the stock and reduce over heat to a light syrup, then spoon it over and serve on the brioche.
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.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
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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