Duck Day 2019 Menu and Recipes

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Duck Day 2019 Menu and Recipes

Our thanksgiving-day extravaganza is done, and as usual I’m posting a blog entry for posterity and my own reference so I can find these things again if I need them. :-)

We’ve done “Asian fusion” many times–it’s kind of corwin and my culinary wheelhouse–but this is the first time we really incorporated more filipino flavors.

First, the menu:

2019 Duck Day: Tour of the Eastern Rim of the Pacific

(Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila, Palu)

“Sinigang” Amuse

Tomato Dashi & Sake (Kubota Hekijyu junmai daiginjo)

with a dehydrated mushroom chip

powdered shoyu

powdered tamarind

“Pu-Pu Platter” with Scorpion Bowl

Curry puff with curry mayo

Lumpia (traditional filipino fried spring rolls)

Chicken wings with candied ginger and orange

Pickles: honshimeji mushroom, yuzu-pickled napa

Assortment of dipping sauces

“Adobo” served with Sapporo Premium

duck confit adobo style (with soy, vinegar, garlic and ginger)

with a duck-fat crisped potato and

adobo-style vinaigrette tossed peas

topped with crispy garlic

Zhajiang Mian (fried sauce noodle)

homemade chewy wheat noodle with ground duck and bean paste sauce

With shochu oolong hi-ball

Duck a l’kalamansi (filipino bitter orange) with Trimbach Reserve Gewurtzraminer

Rice two ways

Steamed bok choy

and a caramel vinegar gastrique

Palate cleanser

Yuzu sorbet with finger lime caviar, served with Kikusui Perfect Snow unfiltered sake

Dessert

Saikyo miso ice cream

With almond brown butter Sablé cookies

Puffed rice

And hot chocolate

Tea, Coffee, and Mignardise

candied ginger

almond coconut mango-marmalade thumbprint cookies

almond brown-butter-chocolate cookies

Every year there ends up being something we forgot to serve. This year it was the matchstick carrots and cucumber that were supposed to garnish the zhajiang noodle! Ah well.

“Sinigang” Amuse

Tomato Dashi & Sake (Kubota Hekijyu junmai daiginjo)

with a dehydrated mushroom chip

powdered shoyu

powdered tamarind

This dish combines two things. One is the idea of sinigang, which is a filipino tamarind-flavored stew/soup that often has fish, tomato, and onion. The other is the technique of mixing sake with a hot, intense broth to delicious effect. We learned this trick one wet, cold rainy afternoon while out day drinking with a chef friend-of-a-friend in the Akabane area of Tokyo. One of the places he took us was an oden (stewed fishball & tofu) shop where you could buy a one-cup sake. When you drank half your sake, for ten yen you could get them to top up the glass with the oden broth.

corwin made the broth by starting with our home-canned smoked tomato water (already one of the most umami-intense things we have), simmering it with kombu and bonito flakes to make it tomato dashi, and then going over to a friend/s house to borrow his Spinzall (food centrifuge) to clarify it.

For the tamarind flavor we put tamarind powder on the plate for folks to rim their glasses with. We also gave them the soup and the sake separately to mix as they liked. And also some powdered soy sauce we got as a parting gift at one of the fancy restaurants we ate at in Kyoto: Shimogamo Saryo.

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Some of the delights of #duckday2019

A post shared by Regis (@rmd1023) on Nov 28, 2019 at 9:49pm PST

Curry Puff

corwin made the curry puff (karipap), startingwith making his own curry powder. He didn’t use the karipap recipe in Asian Dumplings but instead used his own biscuit dough recipe and it worked beautifully.

Lumpia

It was my first time making lumpia. Lumpia is one of those foods that was at every filipino party we went to when I was growing up, but my family was never the one that made them. (We brought the pancit or the dessert.) It was traditional for the aunties to complain about what a pain they are to make, though. Well, now I know what they mean, but it is SO WORTH IT.

This is by far the weirdest dumpling skin or wrapper I’ve made yet. Andrea Nguyen’s ASIAN DUMPLINGS is my go-to book–she hasn’t steered me wrong, yet. The technique for making these involved picking up the entire blob of wet dough in your hand and them blopping it onto a slightly hot pan, and the smear you leave on the pan IS THE LUMPIA WRAPPER.

What I learned is if the pan is too hot is that it just sears the ball of dough in your hand but it doesn’t stick to the pan. This is bad. And if the pan isn’t hot enough, then it doesn’t work either. So there is a very narrow window where it works. I had to turn the burner on and off between each one and also dribble a little extra water into the dough before each one. What would work is I would make one, and when the pan was the right heat, the wrapper would release, and this would mean it was now the right heat for the next one to be made. I would turn off the heat, make the next one, let it cool for a few seconds in the pan and then have to heat it back up again to release it and be ready for the next one.

Here’s Andrea Nguyen’s short video on how to do it:

The filling I used was similar to the recipe in Asian Dumplings, but I replaced the carrot and bean with water chestnuts (and the ground meat was duck). If I do it again I’ll probably use pork and up the intensity of the spices/salt/fish sauce. It could use dried shrimp in the sauce.

Chicken Wings with Candied Ginger and Orange

This was one of those ideas I had one day while we were out and I made a note in my phone months ago: what if instead of just having a chicken wing that was honey-glazed and chewy you could take that to the next level by having actual bits of candied ginger and candied orange rind in the glaze? I tested it last week and was very pleased with the results.

Although I candied my own ginger for the mignardise in this meal, I used some that I had bought at Cambridge Naturals for this recipe, and the candied orange rinds were some fancy artisanal ones corwin picked up at Formaggio. But I think Trader Joe’s or whatever would work just as well.

The first step is oven-frying the chicken wings as detailed by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats (as in this recipe: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2015/01/hot-and-numbing-oven-fried-xian-chicken-wings-recipe.html)

I ran tests last week where I tried both spicing them with a technique as described in the Serious Eats article (toss the crispy wings in oil and then in a spice mix) and also by tossing them in a glaze. Turned out the way we liked them best was tossed in the spices and THEN dipped in the glaze separately. That was a little impractical for a large dinner party so I settled for brushing them with glaze and then sprinkling the chopped bits of candied ginger and orange rind on them. By not coating them completely in glaze, they retain more crispness.

Glaze:

1 cup orange juice

1 cup water

quarter to half cup yuzu marmalade or other citrus marmalade

quarter to half cup apple cider vinegar

1/8 to quarter cup brown sugar

powdered ginger

minced garlic

I am a little loose on the quantities in the glaze recipe because I think it really depends on how sweet the orange juice is and how sour the vinegar is — you just have to taste it to see if it’s what you want.

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Second course: “pu pu platter with scorpion bowl”. I reinvented the chicken wing for this, with candied ginger and orange rind. Curried duck puffs. And fried lumpia with ground duck and shrimp filling (Filipino spring rolls) which are the fiddliest thing I’ve ever made! But damn they came out great! #duckday2019

A post shared by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2019 at 10:18pm PST

Adobo is a filipino dish that has more variations than there are islands. The common element seems to be the combination of soy, vinegar, and garlic. Some have curry powder, some have ginger, etc. Some stew chicken and pork together, some are just chicken. My family’s adobo was usually chicken, potatoes, and green beans, stewed together in soy and vinegar with garlic (and served over white rice).

To deconstruct it, corwin confit’ed duck legs sous vide with soy-vinegar-garlic-ginger in the bags. Then he shredded the meat and crisped it in cast iron, and served it with an adobo-flavored reduction, topped with crispy garlic. I boiled the potatoes in advance, then crushed them slightly to give them crisp edges roasted in duck fat. The beans in the dish I replaced by making a mix of bias-cut fresh snap peas and fresh snow peas tossed in a soy-vinegar-ginger-garlic vinaigrette.

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Deconstructed Filipino adobo. Confit duck with a soy-vinegar reduction and crispy garlic, duck fat crisped potato, and fresh snap pea in adobo-style vinaigrette #duckday2019

A post shared by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2019 at 10:21pm PST

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Poultry differently. #duckday2019

A post shared by Liz LaManche (@liz_lamanche) on Nov 29, 2019 at 10:55am PST

Zhajiang Mian (fried sauce noodle)

homemade chewy wheat noodle with ground duck and bean paste sauce

With shochu oolong hi-ball

Normally we do a lot of wine pairings, but a lot of wines just don’t pair with these strong and tangy flavors as well as other alcohols do.

For this one we made Chu-hi, which is the Japanese shochu high ball, using dark pearl oolong tea and a whiskey-like shochu called Gokoo that we first had at Momi Nonmi in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago. (It’s seriously great if you’re a whiskey drinker.)

For the wheat noodle we ended up borrowing a pasta extruding machine from our friends David and Diane. What was funny is when corwin ran our test, he made the dough way too dry, so the noodles came out very rough and odd-looking. But they were so tasty and the chewiness was really good, so we decided to just keep going and use them in the meal.

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Noodle extrusion experiment. I think the pasta is too dry….?

A post shared by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 25, 2019 at 9:53pm PST

The sauce I sort of improvised on some zhajiang mian recipes but I wanted something somewhat spicier to highlight the duck. (Among the ones I looked at: Woks of Life, China Sichuan Food.)

Sauce:

1 lb. ground meat — let sit in 1 tablespoon corn starch, 1 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp white pepper, 1 tablespoon oil 15 minutes before starting

6 slices ginger, minced

6 cloves garlic, minced

6-10 fresh shiitake, chopped/minced

1/4 cup sweet bean paste

1/4 to 1/2 cup ground bean paste

1 tablespoon chili bean paste

1/3 cup dark soy sauce

1 cup water

Soften the ginger and garlic in the oil and then brown the meat. Add the mushrooms after a minute or two, and once the meat is no longer pink, add all the wet ingredients and stir together to combine. Let simmer 15 minutes. Then add 1/2 cup water with 1 TBS cornstarch dissolved in it to thicken. If still too thin, simmer 5 more minutes.

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Zhajiang “fried sauce” noodles – homemade thick wheat noodle with ground duck and bean paste sauce. So happy with how this came out! #duckday2019

A post shared by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2019 at 10:24pm PST

This was the dish where I forgot the garnish! I have all these matchstick cut carrots and cucumber and I forgot entirely to put them on the plate! There’s always SOMETHING that gets left off.

Duck a l’kalamansi (filipino bitter orange) with Trimbach Reserve Gewurtzraminer

Rice two ways

Steamed bok choy

and a caramel vinegar gastrique

This is basically duck a l’orange, which we’ve never done in all these years of making duck. Typically this comes out too sweet because people use regular oranges instead of bitter oranges. corwin ordered a bunch of kalamansi (filipino bitter orange) online, though, when he was getting our now-nnual yuzu order. This is also when he picked up the finger limes for the palate cleanser.

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Duck a l’orange done Peking style with calamansi oranges for a Filipino touch. #duckday2019

A post shared by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2019 at 10:25pm PST

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Yin yang rice. One of the elements of one of the courses. #duckday2019

A post shared by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Nov 28, 2019 at 10:03pm PST