Roasted Duck with Sweet and Sour Plum Sauce
I follow food trends like some people follow fashion and pride myself in being open to trying most foods. If I am honest about it though, I find that I eat many of the same foods over and over again—maybe because they evoke a pleasant memory of a special dinner, a popular song, or a city that I love.
The repetition can become dull though, and when I find myself in a rut I start a search for a new variation on a familiar dish. The cookbook author Diana Henry calls the sauce in this recipe ‘sweet and sour’ which it certainly is, but not at all like the more common Asian plum sauce in dishes like sweet and sour pork, or Peking Duck, for example. This sauce is tangy and sweet with chunks of plum flesh that pair well with roasted local duck. The sauce can be made well in advance and keeps in the refrigerator for a couple weeks. You can serve any extra sauce with roast chicken or with a cheese plate.
Liberty Duck is a decades-old family farm. Before the lockdown started in early March, they only sold their duck wholesale to restaurants and grocery stores. Like the rest of us, when we were all sheltering in place, they were scrambling to make the best of their situation and started selling duck to the general public. I first learned about them in an email announcing a new website set up to help local farmers stay afloat. They make deliveries a couple of times a week to various locations in the Bay Area, but you can also pick up your order from them directly (“curbside”).
Photo by: Lucy Alexander
Ingredients:
2 lbs. plums (Italian plums if you can get them)
1 cup each of apple cider vinegar and red wine
1 ½ cups light brown sugar
½ teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
½ teaspoon cardamom seeds (from about 6 pods) and coriander seed ground in mortar and pestle
1 cinnamon stick
2 small chilies seeded, deveined (optional)
4 whole duck legs
6 medium cloves of garlic
Fresh sprigs of rosemary to cover the bottom of the roasting pan.
Preheat oven to 325°
1. Cut the plums in half and take out the pit. Place them in a baking pan in a single layer
cut side down. In a large bowl add the sugar, vinegar and the red wine. Stir to dissolve
the sugar and add the mustard seeds, the ground cardamom, and coriander seeds. Pour
the mixture over the plums. Add the cinnamon stick and the chilies to the pan and roast
the plums for about 1 and 15 minutes. Check after about 40 minutes or so to give the
plums a gently stir. You want the sauce to be a bit chunky. Let it cool and refrigerate
until ready to use. The sauce keeps for a couple of weeks in the fridge.
Preheat the oven to 350°.
2. Choose a roasting pan big enough to hold all the duck legs in a single layer. Cover the bottom of the pan with sprigs of rosemary. Toss the unpeeled garlic cloves over the rosemary and then place the duck legs over the garlic. Season the duck with salt and pepper. Roast for approximately one hour. Serve with plum sauce spooned over the top.
Photo by: Lucy Alexander