Roast Duck with Lavender & Herbs ... and Three Tricks for Leftovers

Sunday Roasts are in my blood. A traditional middle class English background means that I've spent so many Sunday's enjoying a roast joint with the family that that's an inescapable fact, so I guess I'd be bound to continue this tradition. But as much as I enjoy the pleasure of cooking and eating a Sunday roast, it's perhaps the leftovers that I enjoy more than anything. This duck was no exception, and it did such a great job feeding us through the week, I thought I'd make a bit of a special post about leftovers. But first, the main event.

Roast Duck with Lavender & Herbs

Duck is a bit of novelty for me, and once again was I was inspired to cook it by "a woman at Cullompton Farmer's market". I forgot her name last time I bought something from her (Roast Guinea Fowl with Lavender, Mint & Thyme) and now I've gone and done it again! Next time I really must make more effort. She doesn't half deserve the credit as well - not only does she sell great meat, but she makes some of the best pies to be had in Devon I reckon.

Just like that Guinea Fowl, I decided to follow a recipe (well, mostly follow a recipe, I was kind of following several) for the Duck, and from the same "Flavours of the World" book. I've becoming quite fond of Lavender and meat, and this was done with fresh thyme from the garden as well, made into a kind of salty rub that's pressed all over the lightly scored meat before cooking. Wonderful stuff.

The Lavender and Thyme salty mix

Scored and dusted duck ready for the oven

Close up on the dry mix on the bird

The duck itself has been lightly scored to let the fat run, and I'm using a support in my roasting tray as well so that it won't sit in the fat as it's running. This was cooked fast then slow, pretty normal cooking style for me, but longer than I usually do for poultry as I prefer duck either pink or well done, kind of how I like my lamb. It's quite a complex recipe, involving making stocks, reducing them, etc., so I won't go into it all now, but fun to do and not at all challenging, just time consuming.

Duck out of the oven, ready to rest. Lovely crispy skin

Came out pretty tasty, with a wonderful sticky sauce. Lavender's not something to use often in the kitchen perhaps, but now and again it does add a welcome and interesting variation to dishes.

The Roast Duck finished dish, minus vegetables

But then what to do with lots of leftover duck? Duck's often not a huge bird, true, and we had a female this time around which is much smaller than a drake, but you still get a fair bit of meat off it. First things first, it was time for stock.

Duck Stock

The first thing we tend to do with any roast is get the meat off the bones and make a stock. That's one of the great things about always going for meat on the bone, you've not only get a better roast but also bones for stock. I'm not really someone who bothers much with trying to create elaborate stocks, honestly it's usually just bones and water for me cooked for an hour or two, but this time I added the usual suspects of carrot, celery, onion and bay leaf.

Stock being made

To be fair it does add extra depth to a stock to do this, but I had an ulterior motive as well - I'd worked out what to do for my first proper left over dish - duck & noodle soup.

Duck & Noodle Soup

As ever with these things, my leftover cooking is largely driven by what's in the fridge. The meat may be the core of any dish, but it needs other things to make it into a complete meal. This time around it was cabbage & spring onions that needed eating, so I decided to plump for an oriental style soup.

Ingredients for soup ready to go

By taking the remaining breast off the bird and slicing it into delicate thin discs I intended to make a simple spiced soup, with noodles cooked in stock at the bottom, and cabbage, spring onion and slices of duck on the top. Simple as anything to make. I strained some of the stock off and added some Chinese five spice and soy sauce to taste, and then added each ingredient according to how long it would take to cook.

The stock strained and enriched with soy sauce

Cabbage was first for about 10 minutes till it was getting really tender, then in went the spring onions and noodles for 3 minutes, some very finely sliced fresh ginger (done in inch long extra thin match sticks, to add texture and interest) and some very finely chopped red chili, and finely the duck back in for just a minute at the end to warm it through. Lovely stuff.

Duck & Noodle Soup in the office

This is one of my first trick to leftover cooking - you have to ignore the 'rules' of cooking fresh meat if you want to make the most of leftover meat. If I'd put the duck in earlier it would have got tough and dry, but by reversing things and just adding it at the end you get the opposite effect. By using the stock as well you still get full flavours, without needing any long cooking.

We got four large portions out of this, soup always goes a long way I find. Well, unless the Italian gets hold of it, she's a fiend for soup! Still had lots of duck left though, so next up ...

Roast Duck Ragu

The English are pretty keen on Italian food generally, and in a mixed Italian/English house like hours that's even more pronounced. Ragu or sugo is therefore a bit of a staple way of using up leftovers. Just to clarify, the term sugo generally means a slightly more smooth sauce than ragu, which usually has larger pieces of meat and a rougher texture.

And here the second of my tricks with leftovers. When it comes to well cooked meat you can't really mince it up and re-fry it, that just dries it out or makes a mush - not pleasant. The technique I use these days is to flake the meat, creating texture while preserving the moisture within it.

The flaked duck meat

You still need to cook a ragu long and slow, as tinned tomatoes need time for their flavour to develop, but by flaking in this way and cooking slowly in a liquid environment the meat will enrich the dish and not get tough or dry.

I always do my ragu's the same way, the usual sofrito of onion, carrot and celery is cooked till golden and tender, then in with the meat, deglaze with wine if you like, and in with the tomatoes and herbs.

That leads me to my third trick with using leftovers, adding something from the original dish so that you always get a different result, that way your food never gets too samey. For this one, for example, I chopped up the leftover skin really finely and added that to the sauce with all it's flavours of lavender and thyme. Once that's blended with the rest you don't really pick up the individual notes of flavour anymore, but it does add a subtle distinctness which makes all my ragus or sugos different, no matter what they're based on. Whether it's a lamb cooked with lemon balm, or chicken cooked with basil, I think your main roast always ends up adding something special to a leftover dish, which you'd otherwise be hard pressed to create. Sometimes it may be that the meat itself is simply infused with interesting and different flavours, other times there may be something leftover you can add, but either way it keeps you from getting bored with your food.

Ready for deglazing, white wine this time (usually what Italians use)

Now with the tomatoes added, ready for long slow cooking

One note on ragus and sugos - don't skimp on the tomatoes, or the herbs for that matter. I used six tins of tomatoes I think, plus a large bundle of marjoram, thyme, bay and rosemary. Your sauce will be very wet to start with, but the long, slow cooking will slowly reduce it down, concentrating the flavours. I think I must have done this one for about two hours at least, maybe three. Served it with a good thick pasta, and that made supper for the two of us and then lunch the next day as well. Then it was off to the freezer with the rest of the ragus for other days.

Ragus ready for the freezer

These old cheese pots are fabulous for this - they just about contain two portions per pot, and not skimpy ones either. Let me put it this way, I'm not exactly losing weight eating portions of this size! "DS" stands for Duck Sugo here. Our freezer is usually full of BS, RS, VS, LS - you get the drift I'm sure :-) The labels are for ever getting rubbed off, and we end up playing the mystery sugo game - still, it's all good.

So that's my leftover odyssey. I hope it might inspire others to make more of their Sunday roasts. Duck is an expensive meat compared to others, this one cost about £15, for example, but if you consider that I managed to make twenty four meal portions from it, suddenly it doesn't seem so expensive at all. All the other main ingredients, i.e. pasta, noodles, carrot, onions, etc, are very cheap - and the lavender and herbs free - so it's relatively simple to turn out pretty good quality food like this for less than £1 per meal. Personally I'm amazed people think they're getting a good deal from places like McDonalds, I find it a bit galling to see people chucking tens of pounds at those places, and then claiming they don't have any cash. Still, different folks, different strokes I guess.

All comments welcome, as ever!

My "Top Roasting Tips" or how to make the most of your Sunday roast

All this blogging about cooking has led me to reflect on how it is I cook, and what goes up here as opposed to what doesn't. I've become aware that an awful lot of what I do when I cook is instinctive, all the little tweaks and shortcuts that I just do because I know they'll improve the dish, so they probably never get talked about. I thought I'd try to rectify this by creating my own personal list of what I think is essential when trying to create a good Sunday roast.

This is probably not complete - I guess I can always come back and add more - but I've tried to make it chronological at least, so these are the things I think you need to be worrying about when you think about your roast.

1. Buy Good Quality Meat
   This has to be top of the list. More than absolutely everything else this is the number one factor that will make or break your finished meal, as without a good piece of meat to start with you're never going to have a good finished product. Don't confuse good with expensive either - some of the most fab cuts are wonderfully cheap (e.g. shin of beef) - you just need to know how to cook them.
2. Don't Roast it Straight from Cold
   Roasts are almost always big pieces of meat, and if you take them out of the fridge and put them straight in the oven then meat in the middle of the joint is going to heat up much slower than that on the outside. Sometimes this can be a benefit - perhaps you want to keep the middle of a joint of beef very rare - but personally I always find it best to take the meat out at least an hour (sometimes longer - depends on the meat) and leave it to get up to room temperature. Don't fret too much about it going bad - an hour or so won't hurt (though don't leave it anywhere warm like on a radiator!) and you'll get a better end product.
3. Season Well Before Roasting
   Seasoning is always critical, and this applies just as much to roasts as anything else. You can be quite generous with the salt & pepper. Do make sure you do the inside of poultry and rolled pieces if you can, but don't over do it on pork crackling or it'll be over salted. Also, don't salt early - it'll start to leech juices out of the meat. Do it just before the meat goes into the oven.
4. Know Your Oven!
   You don't necessarily need a great oven for a great roast, but you do need to know what you've got. Some ovens create temperatures that are widely different to what they display or what their controls suggest, so if you're in any doubt over your own oven check it with an oven thermometer. You never know, all those apparent failures may have been the oven's fault and not yours at all!
5. Hot Then Cool
   Many cooks use this technique, and though I deviate from it quite frequently (with slow roasts and spit roasting in particular) it's still the one I do most often. Basically you start the roast off at a high temperature for a short time to start crisping up the outside and force heat into the meat, and then turn it down for the rest of cooking so you don't burn the outisde and the heat gradually permeates through and cooks evenly.
6. It's Done When It's Done
   At the end of the day a roast is ready when it's ready, all you can do with timing and temperatures is try and get some sort of reliable guide as to when. There are lots of ways of checking when meat is ready, a thermometer apparently being the best (though personally I've never used one). For chicken and pork it's the juices running clear when you pierce the thickest piece of meat, for lamb and beef it's pretty much whenever it's gets to the stage you like it at! All I'm saying here is don't just assume it's ready- at least don't be a slave to the timing.
7. Rest the Meat
   Resting is crucial. In fact if I was ordering these by priority then this would be number two after the quality of the meat. Resting allows the meat to 'relax', and ensures that the juices flow back from their excited states back into the fibres where you want them, creating a tender juicy mouthful. All joints could do with 20 minutes or so - large joints even more. Do make sure that you rest somewhere warm - not hot, not cold, but warm. Still in the oven is OK, provided the door is open a little to let some heat out, but you'll need the pan it was roasting on to ...
8. Deglaze for Gravy
   Gravy has been many peoples bugbear, mine included, but no longer. Here's what I do. Once the meat is out of the pan and resting somewhere get rid of most of the fat from the pan (if it's good fat, like beef, then keep it aside for other cooking) and put the pan back on the heat on top of the stove. Add some liquid, and scrape up all the good stuff in the pan into the liquid, and reduce till you get to the consistency you like. That's it. If you like a thick gravy leave a little fat in the pan and stir some flour into it and cook it a little before you add the liquid (a little at a time). If you want to include some other flavours use wine, port, stock, water from vegetables, anything really in place of plain old water, or stir in some mustard, fruit jelly, whatever you fancy, but basic gravy is really quite straightforward.
9. Serve on Warm Plates/Dishes
   Nobody wants to eat food so hot they get burnt, but the problem with roasts is often the opposite - what with resting and all the other mucking about the food can be too cool by the time it hits the table. To get around this you really do need to warm your plates beforehand, and by warm I actually mean quite hot. You don't want the meat to sizzle when you put it on (and believe me I've done that a few times!) but you do want them practically too hot to handle.

Well there are my thoughts on what makes a good roast - love to hear what tips and tricks others have to share!