Duck Prosciutto, the start of a year of meating great people!
A funny thing happened last summer. My sister sent me home from her place with a large bag full of peppers from her garden. I am a big fan of pickled peppers, so I decided to pickle and can them. I started looking at recipes and found myself in a quandary as to what ratio of vinegar to water to use. I reached out to Laura Levy of laurasbestrecipes.com (@laurasrecipes on twitter) who put me in touch with the queen of canning Cathy Barrow of mrswheelbarrow.com (@MrsWheelbarrow on twitter) who graciously solved my quandary. Needless to say I began following her on twitter and in December, I happened to witness the birth of charcutepalooza in the tweets between Cathy Barrow and Kim Foster of theyummymummy.blogspot.com (@theyummymummy on twitter). I wanted in from the get go.
Charcutepalooza you ask… what in the world is that? The simplest way to describe it is as a movement of food bloggers (almost 300 of them at last count) to learn the art of chacuterie using each other and the book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn as recourses. Charcutepalooza is also the hash tag which when searched for as “#charcutepalooza” allows one to follow the conversation on twitter. Everything you need to know to participate or just follow along can be found here on Cathy Barrow’s site: http://www.mrswheelbarrow.com/charcutepalooza/the-ruhls-2/.
The whole idea is to challenge everyone to do a recipe (project seems more appt) from the book every month. I’d had the book for just over a year when this all started and so the challenge appealed to me because I’d yet to try anything in the book. The first challenge was to cure duck breast into a duck prosciutto. A simple project to start with that for me came at a time that couldn’t have been more perfect. I had only recently become interested in cooking duck and learned that I really like it (my dad loves it with a capitol L). So on the heels of roasting duck (dad ate half of that duck) and smoking duck (a post which I’m still in the process of writing) it seemed only natural to cure some duck into prosciutto.
The making of duck prosciutto is fairly straight forward. You nestle your breasts in kosher salt and cover with more of the same and refrigerate for 24 hours before rinsing, drying, seasoning, wrapping in cheese cloth, and tying with kitchen twine to hang and dry slowly for about a week. Of course it’s not quite that simple.
The duck breast is going to shrink during the drying process so it’s helpful to start with as big a piece of duck as possible. The best option is to use a breast from a “magret” duck. These are cross breed of a Pekin hen and a Muscovy drake and are the type used in making foie gras. Because of the feeding process, they develop a much larger breast than any other breed of duck.
When hanging your duck to dry, it’s important to have the right atmospheric conditions. A temperature between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit is preferable to prevent the wrong microorganisms from ruining your meat. In addition, a humidity level of 75% is necessary to allow the meat to dry evenly. Too moist and the meat will dry too slowly and could possibly mold. To dry and the surface can dry too quickly preventing the inside from drying properly.
These conditions proved a serious challenge for me as I live in a high desert where the humidity is rarely above 10% in the winter. Luckily I found a closet in the house (we store potatoes and onions in it) which varied between 55 and 60 degrees and by using a large bowl of salted water (the salt inhibits mold) I was able to achieve acceptable conditions. Others solved the problem with the use of wine refrigerators and wet towels among other things.
When we all started, it was thought that we wanted a 30% loss in weight as the meat hung to dry. That however has turned out not to be very reliable due to the differences in the amount of fat on the breasts. The best method seems to be by touch. As the meat dries it should become fairly firm, but not hard. If you’re familiar with the touch method of cooking steak, you want your breasts to feel firm like a medium to well cooked steak. The color should be a deep rich meaty red.
The recipe in the book called for seasoning the meat with white pepper, but I saw people trying many different variations, so I did one with pepper (I don’t keep white pepper around as I can’t get the whole pepper corns here) and the other I sprinkled with garlic powder and cayenne pepper. To do it over again (I’m sure I will) I would season more heavily and experiment with different spice combinations.
I need to preface this next paragraph and admit that I should not have taken my first taste right after cleaning out the refrigerator and taking out the garbage with the results of that task prominent at the top of the can both visually and aromatically.
When I cut into the breasts for the first time, I was pleasantly surprised with the fairly uniform color of the meat. In my first taste of duck prosciutto, I had to try it by itself, I didn’t want anything to distract from the pure product of my labor. I have to admit that the skin of the duck caught me a little off guard as the meat and fat of the duck melded in a salty concentrated burst of poultry flavor in my mouth leaving a thin strip of tougher rubbery skin. Honestly, I had to work to prevent my gag reflex from taking over. I’ve had prosciutto before, and while similar in texture, duck is not pork. It is its own thing. Lesson learned- duck prosciutto is concentrated poultry and should be used with that in mind.
By far my favorite use has been with ramen noodles and a hot broth. Seriously, a sub dollar kimchi ramen bowl topped with a sliced hardboiled egg, a splash each of fish sauce and sesame oil, and topped with thin slices of duck prosciutto is simply heavenly (add a little sliced spring onion for even more eye appeal). I’ve long had a love affair with the way the yolk of a hardboiled egg dissolves in broth creating a silky mouth feel. The way the thin slices of duck soften and melt into that broth is an exciting compliment to it. I think duck and kimchi are great together. My father agrees, (we’ve had it three times in the past week).
I can’t wait to try curing more and trying it with some of the great ideas I’ve seen from other bloggers. Top of my list is baked in with macaroni and cheese. Other ideas include wrapping slices around a blue cheese stuffed date, wilted spinach salad with a hot vinaigrette, and frittata with artichoke hearts, tomato, and cheese. The sky is the limit when it comes to things that a salty concentrated poultry flavor would go with.
