Quack!

So last week I had the chore and pleasure of turning 18 6-pound dead ducks into food.....good food. And man was it a lot of work.

First, I had to butcher them all. This in itself took half a day. It had been quite a while since I had broken down a bird so I was a bit rusty, but once I got back into the swing of it, it got much easier. I got it down to about 7 minutes a bird, which I'm sure I could have done in even less time had I had a french chef yelling at me, but I don't...because I'm the chef now - so the french can stick it.

Once I seperated out the legs, breasts, and gizzards, i took all the bones and fat scraps and everything, washed them really well, and dumped them in a huge pot of cold water and made stock and rendered the fat at the same time. While that was going, I salted the legs and put them in the cooler to dry for the night. That was the end of day one.

The next day I heated up all the fat that I had rendered, seperated, and strained and put the legs in it to confit. With so many legs, I ended up doing two different rubs. For those that don't know what confit is, it's where you cook something very slowly for a long time in fat. The long cook time allows the fat to displace all of the water in whatever you're confiting, thus eliminating any room for bacteria growth...aka preserving it.

After that I took half of the breasts - the biggest ones - and burried them in salt and spices to make procuitto out of them. All-the-while reducing the stock down to half, which took all day. Once the confit was done and cool, I removed the legs from the fat and strained it along with the little bit of super flavorful juice that the legs leave behind. Then i poured the fat back over the legs to perserve them (they'll keep for six months easily in the cooler - i've eaten it a year later and it's still great). That was day two.

Day three I removed the breasts from the salt and smoked them in our combi oven, which thankfully has an airtight seal around the door. There's no better way to find out how NOT air tight your oven is than to smoke something in it.

Then came sausage. I ground the other half of the breasts alnong with all that super flavorful juice from the confit. I also added some toasted corriander and dates. My friend Dan helped me case it in hog intestine. Mmmmm....intestine. Then we decided there was too much to do fresh so we cased some in beef middle (middle intestine, that is) to dry cure for duck salumi. In about 8-12 weeks that'll be ready to rock & roll. Then, after all that, I still had the gizzards. At first I was going to confit them in olive oil, which would have been good, but I had too many of them and I never would have used all of them. So, I decided to make gizzard sausage - a feat I had never attempted before. After Dan and I cleaned all the hearts, livers, and kidneys, I soaked them in Grand Marnier and brandy with a little thyme and salt. Then back to the grinder. Mmmmm.....ground gizzards. I ended up with a little more than I could case, so I made a gizzard burger for dinner. That's something you can't say every day. I 'm gonna dry this one, too, and see what happens.

Then I removed the breasts from the "smoker" and hung them to dry. In about two weeks I'll have duck procuitto, though I may let them go longer than that, depending on what I decide to do with them. Also, this whole time I was reducing the stock even further, to a brown, sticky mass we call demi-glace. Then I put it in ice cube trays and froze it so we have it on hand....because we all know a kitchen's not a kitchen without duck demi at the ready. That was day three.

Three days. Three days of duck. And what do I have to show for it? Demi-glace, 2 kinds of confit, duck procuitto, fresh sausage, duck salumi, gizzard salumi, and enough duck fat to confit a small person. Mmmmmm....person.