Roast Duck

We went for a meal on Christmas day at Babur. Excellent as it was, it means we haven’t done a roast for ourselves over Christmas yet, so we’re doing one on New Year’s Eve, and we’re doing duck. The full menu is:

Roast duck with mashed potato stuffing
Heritage sage & onion stuffing (OK… it’s Paxo :) )
Roast potatoes
Salted caramel parsnips
Sprouts, with bacon & pine nuts
Bread sauce
Cranberry sauce

Mmm…

So here’s what we’re doing to make each part.

Roast duck with mashed potato stuffing

We (well Soph really) is following the Nigel Slater Real Food (p28) for this.

The duck gets pocked with a carving fork, then boiling water is poured over a few times, then it stands for 45 minutes to dry out before getting salted. This is all to dry out the skin so it’s crispy rather than fatty and flabby.

This gets stuffed with crushed potatoes and fried onions, plus rosemary, then roasts above the potatoes for about 90mins total.

Then it gets 30mins to stand while other things get cooked.

Roast potatoes

We’ll boil Maris Piper potatoes until they’re just tender, give them a good shake in the pan to rough up the edges, then cook under the duck to roast them in the duck fat. Mmm… duck fat.

Salted caramel parsnips

We were planning to be lazy with this, and had ordered pre-made salted caramel parsnips. However the store ran out, so we just got regular parsnips… so we’re going to make them salted caramel ones ourselves using this BBC Good Food recipe.

So basically par boil the parsnips, then roast them. Before serving we make a runny caramel on the hob, adding butter and salt at the end before pouring over the roast parsnips.

Sprouts, with bacon

We’ll boil up the sprouts, then finish off by frying with bacon, and sprinkling with pine nuts. Mmm…. bacon.

Bread sauce

Milk gets infused with onions, cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves. At the end butter & cream gets added with soft breadcrumbs.