How to Cook Duck Over Fire - Crisp Skin, Pink Breast, and What to Do With the Legs

Duck has a reputation. People think it is difficult, greasy, either raw or dry, and best left to restaurants. I understand where that comes from, because a duck in a domestic oven is a fight: too much fat, not enough heat, a smoke alarm going off.

Over a fire, the same bird is a joy. The fat that fills your oven with smoke drips onto the embers and comes back up as flavour. The skin crisps properly because the heat is radiant and dry. And you can cook the breast and the legs differently, which is the secret to duck that most recipes ignore.

Wild or Farmed

They are different birds and want different handling.

• Wild duck (mallard, teal, wigeon): In season from September to the end of January. Small, lean, deeply flavoured, with almost no fat under the skin. Cooked fast and served pink, or it goes tough. A mallard feeds two, a teal feeds one
• Farmed duck (Aylesbury, Gressingham, Barbary): Big, fatty, forgiving. Feeds four. The fat needs rendering and the legs need time. This is the duck most people mean

Everything below is for a farmed duck unless I say otherwise. For wild birds, cook them like the game birds in my other guide: hot, fast, rested, pink.

The Whole Duck: Spatchcocked

A whole duck roasted upright over fire takes ages and cooks unevenly. Take the backbone out, flatten it, and it becomes a different proposition: all the skin faces the heat, the legs and breast are closer to level, and it cooks in about an hour.

• Dry the skin. The day before if you can, uncovered in the fridge. Dry skin crisps; damp skin steams
• Score the fat over the breast in a diamond pattern, just through the skin, not into the meat. This lets the fat render out
• Salt it heavily, inside and out, and leave it for an hour
• Set up a two-zone fire with a bed of embers on one side and almost nothing on the other. Duck wants indirect heat for most of its life
• Start skin side up, in the cool zone, with a drip tray underneath if you can. Forty minutes to an hour, until the fat has mostly rendered and the legs read 70C at the thickest point
• Finish skin side down, over the hot embers, for three or four minutes to crisp it. Watch it. Rendered duck fat flares
• Rest for fifteen minutes. Then cut the breasts off and slice them, and take the legs off whole

The breast will be a touch more cooked than restaurant pink, because it has been on with the legs. If that matters to you, cook the parts separately, which is what I do at events.

The Breast: Fast and Pink

Duck breast over fire is one of the great five-minute dinners.

• Score the skin, salt it, and let it sit at room temperature for half an hour
• Start it skin side down over the gentle zone of the fire, not the hot one. You are rendering the fat, not searing it yet. Six to eight minutes, until the skin is golden and much of the fat has run
• Move it skin side down over the hot embers for a minute to crisp, then flip for a minute on the flesh side
• Pull at 54C for pink. Rest five minutes. Slice thick

The fat that renders out is worth catching in a pan on the edge of the fire. Potatoes roasted in it are the best potatoes there are.

The Legs: Slow

Legs want the opposite treatment. Long, gentle, until the meat gives up. Salt them, lay them in a cast iron pan with a splash of stock or cider and a few sprigs of thyme, and set the pan at the far edge of the fire with the embers raked away. Cover it. Leave it for an hour and a half, topping up the liquid if it dries. Then take the lid off, rake a few embers closer, and let the skin crisp for the last twenty minutes.

What you get is something close to confit without the vat of fat: meat that falls off the bone under a crackling skin.

The single change that turns duck from difficult into easy is accepting that the breast and the legs are two different ingredients that happen to arrive on the same bird. Cook the breast like a steak and the legs like a stew, and it stops being a fight.
- Cai

What Goes With It

Duck is rich, so it wants something sharp or something bitter. Fire-roasted plums or cherries in autumn. A blackberry and juniper sauce. Charred chicory with a mustard dressing. Beetroot straight from the embers. And, at the risk of repeating myself, potatoes cooked in the fat.

For drinks, a Pinot Noir is the classic and the classic is right. I have written more about what to drink with fire-cooked game.

If you want to see it done, whole duck on the fire is one of the dishes we build a workshop around in the autumn. It is the one people are most surprised by.