Papardelle with duck sauce … just ducky!
If you buy a duck, you buy into many possibilities in the Italian kitchen. Roast duck is only one of them. Roasting a whole duck is an ongoing adventure, with many wonderful varieties in many cultures as well as the final adventure of cleaning your oven. Today we are making an Italian meal for which we cook the leg portions for the first course and the breasts for the meat course. Those could be two different meals if you like.
Ducks are fat. Ducks are especially fat where they sit in the water, but ducks have a layer of fat under the skin all over. This particular approach takes advantage of that. My clients this Sunday were young and healthy and I thought they ought to stay that way.
I butchered this duck the way I would take apart a chicken. I removed the wings, which aren’t particularly wonderful, then cut the breast portion away from the thighs, cutting through the backbone. It was easy. I used a long, sharp knife to gradually remove the breast meat from the bones, which are much easier than a chicken’s bones to navigate. It really only required cutting away the wishbone, right through the skin, and the rest of the breast came away cleanly. The breasts I wrapped and refrigerated for another dish with their skin left on them.
I removed the skin from the thighs and legs as if I were removing pants. I cut away the pads of fat near the tail as well as the tail. I ended up with a pile of skin and cut away fat, a pile of bones and wings and a pile of skinned legs and thighs. I packed up and froze the fat, skin and tail. I packed up and refrigerated the bones, and I prepared to deal with the legs and thighs.
Once preparation is done, there is a brief busy period, and then this sauce just cooks for at least 2 hours, and maybe more. It’s okay to cook it and then keep it and reheat it when you want to serve it. I might even do that and carry the sauce already made to a job if the job were close by. Sometimes this sauce seems improved by refrigerating overnight. I, however, made this sauce far away from home and without the luxury of hours in the kitchen to make it, and it took 2.5 hours from beginning it to serving it. The legs took that long to become tender. There wasn’t anything to do to it most of the time. It just sat and cooked without attention quite peacefully.
This sauce tastes rich without a lot of fat. Every part of the recipe is meant to increase the depth of flavors, to accentuate the gamy qualities of the dark duck meat, and it uses Byzantine spices of the Middle Ages to do that. You can’t taste it and say, “Oh, cloves, rosemary, nutmeg, how spicy this is!” You should instead think, “This is deep and rich and there are unnameable things in there that lay softly on my tongue.”
Pappardelle with duck sauce
The ingredients for four people:
Legs and thighs of a duck, skinless
1 carrot minced
1 leg of celery, including leaves, minced
1 onion, minced
2 tablespoons of powdered porcini, or a handful of dried porcini soaked, cleaned, squeezed out and minced, then fried with the soffritto
a splash of olive oil
1 small piece of duck fat
2 whole cloves of garlic
a glass of red wine
1 can of peeled tomatoes, 14 ounces
a sprig of rosemary
1 bay leaf
1 chili pepper, whole
2 whole cloves
salt to taste
nutmeg to taste
Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
300 grams pappardelle or pappardelle made with 300 grams of flour and three eggs.
Heat a large pot with the splash of oil and the duck fat. I wanted this to taste like duck, but not be greasy and require cooling and de-fatting, ergo just the small piece of fat. When it has become crispy, remove it. Put the duck pieces into the pan and brown them a bit. Since there is no skin, they won’t look very brown, but they’ll lose their redness. Add the minced vegetables. In my case, I had prepared this soffritto ahead of time in the food processor, so it was very finely minced indeed.
Add about 1 teaspoon of salt to the soffritto, and fry it, stirring, until the perfume really develops and the vegetables become soft. Add the whole garlic cloves. Then add the red wine and continue to cook the mixture until the wine cooks into the soffritto and seems to disappear. This all takes only 10-15 minutes, but it is clearly the foundation of your flavor and the kitchen smells paradisaical.
Open the can of tomatoes and add it to the pan, stirring in well, then add the rosemary, the bay leaf, the cloves, the mushroom powder and the chili pepper. I think it is a good idea to stick a toothpick into the chili so you can find and remove it later. Cover the pot and lower the heat to a simmer and leave it for an hour or so. When you come back to it, you can taste it for salt. It will need some, how much depends on you. Add it now so the duck meat will be well-flavored. Then recover it and leave it again to simmer until the duck meat is tender—about another hour or hour and a half. Start early enough so it won’t ruin your dinner plans. If you want to leave the house, you might even put it into the oven to cook so you won’t have to be concerned that it might dry out or catch onto the bottom of the pan. You really can’t overcook it, but you could burn it. Were I to put it into the oven, I’d use a temperature of about 150°C or 300°F.
When the meat is tender to a cooking fork, remove it to a plate and let it cool just enough so that you can handle it. Remove the meat from the bones and cut it into pieces of about 1-1/2” long. Return the meat to the sauce. Check one last time for salt. It shouldn’t taste salty, but should be spritely and savory. Remove the chili pepper and using a wooden spoon, break up any pieces of tomato that still look large and mash the cooked garlic cloves so that they disappear. Now, add enough nutmeg so that the perfume of it rises into your nose.
Nutmeg is a bone of contention with some cooks. There is a regrettable tendency for some cooks to be too generous with nutmeg so that everything tastes of it. That is wrong. The nutmeg should be subtle. It adds a certain gaminess when used correctly without smelling like Christmas. That’s what you want.
This sauce is done. If you are cooking ahead you can now put it into the fridge or even the freezer until you want it, and then reheat it in a big pot when you prepare the pasta.
You can make pappardelle very easily using the basic pasta recipe from weeks ago. You can also fake them by buying fresh lasagna sheets of pasta and cutting them into wide ribbons. Or, you can buy dried pappardelle. In every case, you need to heat a large amount of water to a boil, salt it and cook the pappardelle until they are just firmly done. Fresh ones will cook in 2-3 minutes. They rise to the surface of the water and when you bite one it resists. Drain the pasta and put it into the pot that contains the duck sauce and toss it all together. Serve it immediately, smoking hot, and pass a bowl of freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano. You will please four people very well.
Now, let’s send this off to Presto Pasta Night and see what the world makes of it.
7 comments September 6th, 2007
