Confit de Canard (Light)
The following recipe is something I made up while wanting to cook duck the ‘nice way’, but not wanting to steep it in a vat of its own grease overnight. So, I had a play with some French ideas and tried the following. It turned out very well so I thought I’d share it here for you to try yourself.
You will need:
- A slow cooker
- four duck’s legs (or quarters), washed
- two onions, peeled and chopped in quarters
- five cloves of garlic, peeled
- one bottle of French cider (a nice smokey, dry cidre de Normandie is best)
- one litre of chicken stock
Start by heating up a large, heavy frying pan and put the duck legs in, fat side down. Keep the heat low, but enough to slowly render away the fat. After about 10 minutes, you should have a crisp and thin fat layer on the duck meat (the meat itself uncooked) sitting in a pan of duck fat. Take out the legs and put them into the slow cooker with all of the remaining ingredients. Switch the slow cooker to the ‘low’ setting and leave it for eight hours.
The legs will finish absolutely tender (you will have to be careful rescuing them from the stock) and just slightly pink inside. Serve them with some steamed vegetables and on some plain rice, or with an onion chutney and some fresh bread.
With the duck fat left in the original frying pan, you can store it for your Sunday roast potatoes; but the point of this was not to use it so I disposed of mine.
