French · Starter
Rillettes de Canard
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, acid holding everything up to the light, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 6 duck legs (about 1.4 kg)
- 300 g duck fat
- 22 g fine sea salt
- 3 g white pepper, ground
- 1 g ground mace
- 2 bay leaves
- 4 sprigs thyme
- 4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
- 150 ml dry white wine
- 100 ml water
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
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
- Rub the legs with the salt, white pepper and mace, tuck the thyme, bay and garlic around them, and leave them covered in the fridge overnight.
- Brush the herbs off and set the legs in a heavy pot with the duck fat, wine and water. Bring to the point where one bubble breaks every few seconds, cover, and cook at 130C (265F) for about 3 hours, until a leg bone pulls clean with no resistance at all. 180 min
- Lift the meat out warm, discard the bones, and pull the flesh apart with two forks into long threads running with the grain. Chop the skin small and add it back.
- Beat the strained cooking liquid into the meat a spoonful at a time until the threads are coated and glossy but still separate. Chill a teaspoonful and taste that for salt before you commit.
- Pack into jars, pressing out every air pocket, and seal each with a 5 mm cap of the clear fat lifted off the top of the cooking liquid. Give them a week in the fridge before you open one. Keep them below 4C (39F), eat within a month, and once a jar is opened finish it within a week. Never store them out of the fridge, whatever the cap looks like.
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.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
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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