Italian · Main
Pappardelle al Ragù d'Anatra
- Intermediate
- 50 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with a floral thread lifting the aroma, aromatics blooming from the first bite, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 4 duck legs (about 1 kg)
- 8 g fine sea salt
- 1 onion (about 150 g), finely diced
- 1 carrot (about 100 g), finely diced
- 2 celery sticks (about 100 g), finely diced
- 3 cloves garlic, sliced
- 2 sprigs rosemary
- 6 juniper berries, crushed
- 250 ml dry red wine
- 400 g tinned peeled tomatoes, crushed
- 300 ml chicken stock
- 500 g fresh pappardelle
- 60 g Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedSalted water & the float test
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · celery · 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
- Salt the legs and lay them skin down in a cold, dry, heavy pan. Set it over low heat and leave them 15 minutes to 20 minutes, until a pool of clear fat has run out and the skin is deep brown and stiff. Lift them out. 15 min
- Pour off all but 40 ml of the fat and keep the rest. Sweat the onion, carrot, celery and garlic in the pan with a pinch of salt until soft and sweet with no colour, about 15 minutes. 15 min
- Add the rosemary and juniper, pour in the wine and boil until the pan smells of wine rather than of alcohol. Add the tomatoes, stock and the legs, skin up and half submerged, cover, and cook at 150C (300F) for 2 hours 30 minutes. 120 min
- Lift the legs out, pull the meat into threads, chop the skin small and return both to the pan. Discard the bones. Reduce until a spoon drawn across the base leaves a track that fills back slowly.
- Boil the pappardelle in well salted water and drain it a minute early, keeping a ladle of the water. Toss it with the sauce and that water off the heat, then the cheese, until every ribbon is coated.
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.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
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.
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