The French Basque & Gascony · Starter
Gésiers de Canard Confits
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with an earthy, grounding base, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 1 kg duck gizzards, silverskin and gristle trimmed away
- 20 g coarse sea salt
- 1 tsp cracked black pepper
- 4 garlic cloves, crushed
- 3 thyme sprigs and 2 bay leaves
- 1 kg duck fat
- walnut oil and bitter leaves, to serve
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: nuts
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
- Toss the gizzards with the salt, pepper, garlic and herbs, cover and cure them in the fridge overnight, until they feel firm and faintly tacky.
- Rinse the cure off completely and dry the gizzards very well; any water left on them will spit in the fat and shorten their keeping.
- Melt the fat, submerge the gizzards and hold the pot at 85C (185F), the surface trembling with only an occasional lazy bubble, for two and a half to three hours, until a skewer slides in with no resistance.
- Cool them in their fat, then pack into a jar under at least 2 cm of fat with nothing breaking the surface, and pour off the meat juices that settle to the bottom as jelly.
- To serve, lift out, wipe, and crisp in a dry hot pan for two minutes a side until the edges brown, then slice over leaves dressed with walnut oil.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
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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