Type: Meat

Duck Breast with Orange Sauce

(ducktales)

I’ve kinda always been baffled by how much chicken breast Swedes eat. Chicken is great and all, I mean… except for the breast. It is always, ALWAYS overcooked which makes it papery dry, flavorless and completely uninteresting. It can be great, but that really demands a pretty good chef I feel.

So wasn’t this supposed to be about duck? Well yes. Since I’ve started eating duck more frequently I’ve been equally baffled, but the other way around. Basically, no one is eating duck, but compared to the bland chicken, the duck breast is amazing! How to describe it…? It has a certain gamey (duckey) flavor that I guess some people do not like. It’s very meaty as bird meats go and the breast is very tender and juicy. Kind of a mix of dear and chicken maybe, with more fat (from the skin).

Anyway, more people should eat duck is what I’m trying to say. And stop eating so much chicken breast, it really is settling for mediocrity.

This recipe uses a mix of pan frying and sous vide cooking. The pan-frying gives wonderfully crispy skin and the sous vide ensures just perfect meat. Sous vide is a great technique when you’re cooking meat and you really want it to come out a certain way (and really… when don’t you want that?). A sous vide machine is basically a water bath with a thermostat and a timer. It allows you to immerse the meat (sealed in a vacuum bag) in water at an exact temperature for an extended time. So instead of cooking the meat at a high temperature (e.g. against the bottom of a frying pan) and trying to time it so that the core of the meat is juuuuust right, with sous vide, you cook the meat at the temperature at which you prefer the meat to be eaten at, but for a long time. Thus the meat comes out perfectly throughout the entire piece, instead of being overcooked at the surface and perfect in the center.

It’s pretty easy to achieve kinda almost the same great result with only pan-frying, keeping tabs on the core meat temperature with a cooking thermometer.

The duck and orange sauce is a classic coupling and fit really well together. I haven’t found a side that I fell really completes the dish though. This time I went for roasted potatoes, orange braised fennel and fried kale. I really liked the fennel and kale but kinda botched the potatoes, which put me of them as a concept a bit. If you have a favorite side dish to go with duck, please let me know, I’m on the hunt for a favorite 🙂

Special Equipment

  • A sous vide apparatus
  • A vacum sealer
Created with Sketch. 3 hours (of which 2-2.5 hours is waiting) Created with Sketch. 5

Ingredients

  • For the duck
  • 700 gduck breast (usually two pieces)
  • 50 gbutter
  • 50 gsalt
  • Some rapeseed oil for frying
  • For the sauce
  • 300 gorange juice, preferably fresh pressed (circa 5 oranges)
  • 100 gwhite wine
  • 200 gvegetable broth
  • 25 gsugar (2 table spoons)
  • 15 gcorn starch (1.5 tables spoons)
  • A bit of butter

Directions

  1. If you have the time: put the breasts in brine overnight, or a couple of hours before starting to cook, if that’s what you have. Dissolve 50-60 g of salt (ca 1/2 dl) in 1000 g (1L). Let the solution cool and then put the meat in the brine (the salty water). Brineing makes the meat more juicy and gives it a nice saltiness.
  2. Make broth. Cut some carrots, onion and fennel and put in boiling water. Add salt, pepper and bay leaves and let boil for at least two hours.
  3. Cut slices across the skin of the breasts with a sharp knife. This will make the skin more crispy when you fry it. Some might say you should “clean” the meat from tendons and stuff (on the “inside” of the breast/ the non-skin-side), but I really don’t mind them so I usually don’t.
  4. Put the butter in a pan on high heat with a sip of rapeseed oil. When the butter starts to brown, fry the breasts skin side down for about two minutes, while continuously scooping the butter from the pan and pouring it over the meat. Take the meat from the pan but do not throw away the butter, you’ll use it later.

  5. Seal the meat in a vacuum bag and put it in the sous vide machine (I can really recommend this one, it’s great and doesn’t take up a lot of space). If you did not brine the meat, salt both sides before putting into the vacuum bag.
    Cook for at least two hours, three if you have the time, at 54 degrees C (medium rare). Oh, and by the way: you can put whatever in the bag with the meat. If you want more even orange-taste in the dish, put in some orange peel. Like rosemary and thyme? Throw some in there.
  6. Now for the sauce: Grate 1/2 of one orange and squeeze the juice from all of them (circa five oranges should give you 3 dl).
  7. Put the starch in a bowl and pour in the broth (2 dl) while whisking. Add the wine, the orange juice, the peel and the sugar while whisking. Put the mixture in a pan, bring it to a boil and them let it simmer for 20 minutes. This should make for a quite “thin”/ runny sauce. If you like it thicker, add a bit more starch in the beginning.
  8. Add about a table spoon of butter to the sauce and you’re done.
  9. When the meat is done bathing take it out of its bag and put the frying pan (with the melted butter from before) back on the stove on high heat. When the pan is hot, put the breast in, skin side down and repeat step 4: Two minutes on high heat while scooping the melted butter over the meat. Then remove the breasts from the pan and let them rest for five minutes.
  10. Make thin-ish slices. Serve with the sauce and a nice side dish. Bon appetite!

Greek style Chicken with Potato and Tzatziki

(I'm sorry, I can't sing for you)

In the nineties we went to Crete to celebrate my late grandpa’s 70th birthday. We went to a kinda café-restaurant-ish place in a village he and my grandma had been to before. They instantly recognized him and after some pleasantries and most likely some customary Raki (booze, usually home-made), we decided to have dinner there that same evening. It wasn’t a big establishment. We had to decide what to eat so they could go kill it in time for dinner. You know, that sorta place. We decided on chicken and came back a couple of hours later. I vividly remember two things about that meal.

One. From the start the waiter was a bit… off I guess I’d say. The second time he came in… was he drunk? The third time, yes, decidedly drunk and now he also started to apologize profusely. He couldn’t sing to us you see, “I’m very sorry, I can’t sing for you… I’m so sorry”. After a while we understood that the village was in mourning. The waiter cried and apologized. No singing.

Quite surreal.

Two. The chicken and rice. Crispy, lemony, wonderfully roasted chicken with some kind of risotto-ish rice. Creamy and lemon-infused. It was all just really, really great.

So, back to Sweden. A bunch of years later, my dad started to make a lemon tasting, greek style chicken thing, but with potato instead of rice. I just assumed that this was a riff on that memorable meal. Turns out, it was from a recipe booklet he got from our part-greek cousins. That doesn’t really matter though. What matters is this: that chicken and potato is the bomb. And, ironically, the star of the show is the potato! Don’t get me wrong, the chicken is great, but I tend to think that roasted chicken can only be that good. The potato though… beyond great.

What’s also great with this dish is that it’s so, so simple. It needs some time in the oven but takes very little time to prepare.

Created with Sketch. 2 hours in total. 30 minutes preparation, circa 1.5 hours of cooking. Created with Sketch. 6-7 people

Ingredients

  • 1 large organic chicken (circa 1.5-2 kg)
  • 1.5 kgpotatoes
  • 2 lemons
  • 100 gbutter
  • 100 gwater (1 dl)
  • 700 gGreek (or Turkish) yogurt
  • 200 gsoured cream (this is a bit complicated, see below)
  • 1 cucumber
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • 200 golive oil
  • 25 gvinegar (circa 1.5 tbsp)
  • Salt, pepper and oregano

Directions

If you’re feeling ambitious, I’d recommend you to brine the chicken over night. Dissolve approximately 60g of salt per one (1) liter of water. Put the raw chicken in the salt-water (the brine) and let it soak over night in the fridge. As the ion concentration in the brine is higher than the water in the meat, salty water will go into the chicken (osmosis) making it more juicy and naturally a bit salty (well… maybe a bit of a stretch to call it naturally). For pork, chicken (birds in general) and fish this is a really awesome trick.

One more thing. About that soured cream: in Sweden it’s called “gräddfil” and is very common. The closest international equivalent I’ve found seem to be soured cream but I’ve never actually tried it myself. Note that it isn’t the same thing as creme fraîche although that is fairly similar.

Gräddfil is about 12% fat, soured cream about 18% and creme fraîche is a lot fatter. If in doubt, just use more of the yogurt instead.

So, onwards to the instructions!

  1. Heat the oven to 220 C.
  2. Cut the potatoes into quite thick slices and put them in an oven tray. Pour 100g (1 dl) of olive oil over the potatoes. Turn the potatoes in the oil a couple of times thus that the potato slices are well covered in oil.
  3. Place the chicken on an oven grid and put the grid on top of the tray of potatoes.
  4. Press a lemon worth of lemon juice over the chicken, splash it with some olive oil and distribute 50g of butter across the skin of the chicken. Sprinkle some salt and black pepper over the chicken.
  5. Press the other lemon over the potatoes, pour the water into the oven tray and distribute the remaining 50g of butter amongst the potato slices.
  6. Sprinkle oregano quite generously over everything.
  7. Put into the oven for 30 minutes, then take the whole thing out, turn the potatoes and flip the chicken over (belly up). Put everything back into the oven for about 60 more minutes (depending a bit on the size of the chicken).
  8. Now you’re done with that! Over to the Tzatziki. Put the yogurt and the soured cream in a bowl.
  9. Grate the cucumber and press it to remove excess water. Press the garlic cloves and put the garlic and cucumber in with the yogurt.
  10. Add 100g of olive oil (1 dl) and the vinegar (1.5 tbsp) and mix everything together. Add salt and pepper to taste. Done!

 

Serve with a nice Greek salad and make sure to pour some of the juice from the oven tray over the chicken and potatoes on the plate. The roasted chicken dripping down into the lemon-butter-olive oil makes for a truly great dressing.

I hope I get to that original Crete dish some day. I’ve tried making it a couple of times but haven’t really been able to mimic the rice. In the meantime though? Eat this for christ’s sake.

Dumplings

(bingo, bingo, bingo!)

When I was still in school I lived in Shanghai for a bit. I have… shall we say mixed feelings about China. On the one hand it’s a super cool country, buuuut on the other hand they’re not that great at democracy and individual liberty and stuff. While being there, I wrote a thesis on sports betting and had to enlist my brother to register himself at various bookmakers as this is definitely not something you can do from China. You also can’t use google. Or Facebook. Or many other things we take for granted on the internet. And this is of course only scraping the surface, from the vantage point of a privileged westerner. The Chinese people have more alarming concerns than not being able to use Google. Millions of people being moved to clean up the city for a world expo for example. Or citizens waiting 15 years to be allowed a passport. Stuff like that.

China’s oppressiveness is camouflaged juuuust enough for you to forget that it exists if you don’t pay attention. But if you start looking..? Well, then it’s… it’s pretty bad.

All of this said – I do miss Shanghai. A city full of life and possibility. A place were you can start the evening playing bingo at a luxurious restaurant were a waiter drives the top bingo-prize (an electric scooter) through the restaurant honking at every turn yelling “BINGO, BINGO, BINGO”. Then, you continue a couple of floors up the building, befriend a German billionaire with childhood issues and see the sun go up from his 20 000 € per night suite on the 84th floor of The Bottle Opener.

Nothing remotely similar has happened to me in Stockholm, I’ll tell you that. But Shanghai is really a crazy place, in good ways and in bad ways.

Similar to Stockholm though, Shanghai is a city with great food, both at the high and the low end of the price spectra. You can easily find a good meal for less than two dollars and you can (obviously) spend however much you want.

I miss the weird breakfast street pancakes with the brown, gooey, chili stuff and the crispy cracker. I miss the Hongkong duck at my go-to lunch place. I miss the street side wooks. Most of all though, I miss the dumplings at Ruijin Road. They’re just these simple dumplings in broth for 13 or so RMB (≈2$). But man… I got seriously hooked.

I’ve tried to recreate them with this recipe. They’re close enough to vividly remind me of the real deal, but I know they’re not as good.

They are very good thou! You should try them.

Special Equipment

  • A little "dumpling-maker"- tool is advisable (see pictures below) but not necessary
Created with Sketch. 45 min Created with Sketch. 4-5 people

Ingredients

  • 2 litersof vegetable broth, preferably home made of course
  • 50 dumpling wrappers
  • 500 gminced pork
  • 1 egg
  • 250 gpak choi
  • 1 yellow onion or ca 3 leaks
  • 1 pot of cilantro/ coriander (ca 15 g)
  • 1 fresh chili (ca 15-20 g)
  • 3 cloves of garlic (15 g)
  • 1 tbspgrated fresh ginger (20 g)
  • 1 dlpanko (30 g)
  • 2 tbsprice vinegar (30 g/ml)
  • 2 tbspJapanese style soy, e.g. Kikkoman soy (30 g/ml)
  • 2 tbspsesame oil (30 g/ml)
  • Some salt (ca 5 g) and pepper
  • Sichuan pepper if you have it!

Directions

  1. Make a simple broth. Chop up some onions, carrots and whatever and bring to a boil. Add salt, pepper corns and bay leaves. Simmer for and hour (or more if you have the time) and you’re done.
  2. While the broth is boiling away, you have plenty of time to do everything else. Put the pork in a big bowl. Grate the fresh ginger, press the garlic and chop everything choppable and mix it in with the pork.
  3. Lightly beat the egg and add it to the mix. Add the sesame oil, rice vinegar and soy.
  4. Add the panko and stir everything together thoroughly.
  5. Take an appropriate amount of pork-dumpling-batter and put in a wrapper. Seal with the wrapper tool or if you don’t have it, a plain ol’ fork.



  6. Repeat until you’re out of batter and/ or wrappers. Easy!
  7. Now, you can cook these in different ways. I really like them boiled. The you just sift away the vegetables from the broth, add the dumplings to the boiling broth and cook them for 2-3 minutes.
  8. In Shanghai they quite often “steam-fry” them. Then you put some oil in a pan, heat it up to medium/ high, and add the dumplings to the pan. Then you add just a bit of water to the pan and put a lid on. “Steam-fry” them like this for 4-5 minutes. The bottom becomes fried and a bit crispy, while the top gets steamed. Quite good!
  9. And you can also just regular-steam them. I’ll leave that up to you to figure out.

If you want, dip them in three parts soy (e.g. Kikkoman) mixed with one part rice vinegar and some sriracha, but really, they’re great just as they are. And if you’re of the vegetarian persuasion, replace the pork with mushrooms (e.g. champignon) long fried in butter and I think you’ll be pretty pleased.

It really is surprisingly easy to make dumplings (if you don’t think it’s super easy, if you think it’s super easy you’re right on the money). At least if you don’t make the wrappers yourself. I’m sure that can be fun but I’m very pleased with the ones I can get at my local China-store (those I use are called “Gyoza skins”).

And just to have said what really goes without sayin’. IF you are in Shanghai and find yourself close to Ruijin Road. DO NOT tell me about it. I will be consumed by jealousy.

Italian Meatballs

(now with 50% meat!)

Polpette (italian for meatballs) are probably the reason why, sometime in the future, a war between America and Italy will start. This is what will happen: a random american tourist sitting at a restaurant table somewhere in Italy will order Spaghetti with Meatballs. The waiter, having to explain for the millionth time that Spaghetti with Meatballs is not an Italian dish, will loose his brains and kill the american, burn his flag (american tourists always go around with an american flag), and nuke the closest McDonald’s just because.
Well it’s true, Spaghetti with Meatballs is not an Italian dish. Maybe, just maybe, in some very small town in a very small region of Italy someone eat them, but that’s it. Apart from that, they don’t really exist. It seems to be an Italian-American thing. I can imagine how it happened: this Italian immigrant started a restaurant let’s say in New York, and cooked polpette (Italian for meatballs), but some client argued that “Hey, paisà, where’s my pasta?”, because of course Italy equals pasta, and the immigrant had to start putting meatballs on pasta.

But you know what? Feel free to eat them as you like, I will probably stick to the rule, mostly for romantic reasons: when I was a kid my Aunt Maddalena cooked for me the best meatballs ever, and she had a secret for her meatballs: a lot of bread! Probably more bread than meat, maybe because Zia Maddalena didn’t have a lot of money to buy meat, or most likely because with a lot of bread the meatballs came out soft and flavourfull. So here’s my recipe for Meatballs in tomato sauce. Again, you do as you feel like, but please be advised: waiters in Italy get angry easily.

Created with Sketch. 1 hour Created with Sketch. 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 350 gground beef (not too fine, please)
  • 3 slicesof 4/5 days old bread
  • 1 clovesgarlic, finely minced
  • 3 tablespoonfinely minced fresh parsley
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 tablespoongrated Parmigiano cheese
  • 1 egg
  • Grated bread for the "coating"
  • A lot of vegetable oil for frying
  • 750 gramsgood quality tomato sauce
  • 2 tablespoonsolive oil
  • 1 clovegarlic
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

  1. You want to use good bread for this: possibly not soft toast bread, or baguette, or any other light bread. You want some bread whose inside part (in italian is called mollica) is firm, and heavy and moist, possibly with big holes from the raising process. And the bread has to be a bit old, at least 3/4 days. You take the 3 slices (crust and everything) and rinse them under running water; then you squeeze them well so the excess water goes away.
  2. Now just mix all the ingredients together well (bread, meat, minced garlic, parmigiano, parsely, egg, salt and pepper) so that the bread and meat are well mixed evenly, and shape the meatballs. I like to weight them (≃ 60 gr. each) so I’m sure they’re the same size (which means they will also cook evenly).
  3. Now you can coat them with grated bread: the egg in the mix should be enough fot the bread to stick to the balls, but if you feel you need more “glue” you can whip an extra egg, dip the meatballs in it, then bread them.
  4. Now you can fry them, even deep-fry them if you prefer, in a lot of vegetable oil (canola or peanut oil will be perfect) for 7/10 minutes or until the surface of the meatballs obtain a nice orange/brown/gold color.
  5. On the side prepare the tomato sauce: olive oil and garlic on medium heat until the garlic turns gold/brown. At this point add the tomato sauce and salt and pepper and let cook for 10 minutes.
  6. Add the meatballs (use a deep pan, so the meatballs will be covered with tomato sauce) and let cook for 10 more minutes.

After some research, I came to the conclusion that Italy is the only place where the traditional meal is divided in primo-secondo-contorno-frutta.
Primo is usually a pasta dish, or it can be a risotto or rice soup dish.
Secondo is fish or meat or some elaborated eggs or cheese or vegetable dish.
Contorno is a side dish: it can be a salad, some simple steamed greens, or other simply cooked vegetables.
Frutta is of course fresh fruit, usually one piece.
Especially for lunch, this is what you get at an italian table. Probably not in the big cities where the labour market of the globalized times has changed habits, but for the majority of suburban Italy it’s still like this (i.e. my parents’ lunch)

My point here is, Italian meatballs are a secondo, and probably in the globalized world we live in today, they don’t make a lot of sense as a stand-alone dish. They need some contorno to accompany them. I would recommend some simple fried diced eggplants, or some good aged cheese.