Here's another example of that Batali simplicity that is found throughout the entire cookbook. You take a wonderfully rich duck, stuff it with a minimal amount of ingredients, and serve it simply with some fresh produce and olive oil. Nothing overly complicated here at all. And yet it all manages to come together in perfect harmony.
I was able to pick up an entire duck, which will be useful because I will be using the remaining pieces of the duck throughout the blog for other recipes.
If you have a little know how, you can butcher the entire duck yourself as I did. Any good butcher, however, would be more than willing to do this for you. The legs, breasts, and wings all get separated from the carcass, making sure to reserve the liver, breasts, and carcass for later uses.
Next is to debone the leg. With a sharp boning knife, you just follow along the bone and remove the meat in one piece. It's rather hard to describe just by through a blog, so if this is something that you are thinking of doing yourself, I would recommend watching a YouTube video on how to do it.
After that, I combined orange zest, breadcrumbs, garlic, parsley, and olive oil in a mixing bowl. This will be used to stuff the duck leg.
Then with the skin side down, the stuffing gets placed in the duck leg and rolled over. To hold it's shape, the stuffed duck leg gets tied with butchers twine.
I then roasted it in the oven for approximately a half an hour, getting a nice crispy skin on the outside.
Once it cools down to room temperature it is time to plate. The leg gets sliced and placed on the plate, with some fava beans, Pecorino Tuscano, and some extra-virgin olive oil.
This was another very tasty meal. It was a perfectly light springtime dish. It was hard to believe that it would be from the utter simplicity of it all. The orange in the breadcrumbs really popped through, which of course pairs perfectly with duck. Perhaps I've been over complicating things over the years. Perhaps great food really can be this simple.
Even with quite a few more recipes left in this cookbook, I am already starting to see a series of reoccurring themes. This cookbook flows so much smoother than any other cookbook that I have owned. It is clearly not a collection of just some random recipes thrown together for the purpose of selling a book. Common ingredients are used in various courses throughout chapters. The ingredient overlapping it's useful for home cooks in the sense that they don't have to continually go out and buy a bunch of ingredients that will be used solely for one recipe. One could just look around in the various chapters of the book, see that ingredient that they bought a couple of weeks ago, and find a creative use for it. Genius!
I can't wait to keep digging through this encyclopedia of modern Italian cuisine. Until next time...
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