Duck Ravioli with Seared Foie Gras

Okay, so maybe I went a little over the top here. This takes some serious time and money investment – I split the work over two days, doing the just, duck meat and cracklings on day one. Day two was making the ravioli and fillings, and the extra mushrooms/chard for the plate. Once all the crazy prep is done, this is actually quick and easy to cook, as long as you have your mise all set and plan out what need to be cooked when in your head. I got 13 ravioli – 4 was a sizable serving, because these were some jumbo ravioli. Duck just is probably enough for twice that, I froze the extra. Adjust other ingredients accordingly if you’re trying to scale this.

Duck Jus:

Duck carcass (see below for details)

1 onion, diced

3 medium carrots, diced

3 stalks celery, diced

1 bay leaf

A few sprigs of thyme

Black peppercorns

3 tablespoons tomato paste

3 cups red wine

7 cups chicken stock

2 teaspoons duck fat

The easiest way to do all this might be to roast the whole duck and divide it up afterwards; I thought I would just need to use 2 legs to get the meat for the ravioli filling, but in the end I used two breasts and one leg; Do whatever you need to do, but here’s the way I ended up going about this:

Remove the wings, legs, and breasts from the duck. Set aside the legs and breasts. Remove any remaining skin from the carcass – we’re reserving this for fat rendering and cracklings.

Place the remainder of the duck carcass on a baking tray along with the wings and the duck neck. Roast at 400°F for about 40 minutes, until everything has some nice color on it. Flip about halfway through.

Drain and save any fat on the pan. Cut the carcass into chunks and set aside along with the neck and wings.

In a stockpot over medium heat, add two teaspoons of duck fat and the onions/carrots/celery. Cook for 5 minutes until softened, then add the tomato paste and cook for a few more minutes, allowing the paste to start to caramelize. Add in the wine and reduce until it reaches a syrupy consistency.

Add in the chicken stock, reserved duck bones, thyme, bay leaf and peppercorns. The liquid should be covering everything – if not add water until it does.

Simmer for 4 to 5 hours, then strain through a cheesecloth into a smaller pot. Discard the solids, and place the sauce back on a simmer and reduce until you have 3 to 4 cups of jus.

Cracklings:

Take the excess skin you removed from the duck and place it in a cold pan. Set the heat to low, and allow all the fat to render out, occasionally draining the fat through a strainer and saving it – this stuff is liquid gold so we’re keeping as much of it as possible.

Eventually all the fat will render, and the skin will start to brown. This could take in the neighborhood of 45 minutes depending on the heat in the pan, but that’s not set in stone. Once the skin is nice and brown, remove it from the pan. Chop into bite sized pieces.

Duck meat:

2 duck breasts

1 duck leg

Again, maybe not the optimum way to do this, but this is what I ended up doing. For the leg, roast at 400°F until it hits an internal temp of 165°F. For the breasts, place in a pan on medium heat, skin side down. Allow the fat to render until the skin starts to brown. Turn up the heat and get a nice color on the skin side. Flip, and cook briefly on the meat side, about a minute or two. Breasts should take 20 minutes to cook.

Remove the meat from the breasts and leg, and chop finely for ravioli filling.

Ravioli filling:

Reserved duck meat

½ pound crimini mushrooms, roughly choped

4 small shallots

1 tablespoon fresh thyme, chopped

Salt and pepper

In a pan over medium heat, add some duck fat and the chopped mushrooms. Season with salt and cook for 4 minutes. Add the shallots and cook for an additional 2 or 3 minutes. Dump mushrooms and shallots in a bowl along with reserved duck meat, thyme, and some salt and pepper as needed.

Pasta dough:

9 ounces flour

6 ounces eggs (3 large eggs)

1 egg white and 1 tablespoon water for egg wash

I add the flour in a large bowl and weigh it out, then form a well in the middle and add eggs. If your eggs don’t quite weight 6 ounces, add a little water to make up the difference. Beat the eggs, slowly incorporating in the flour.

Once all the flour gets incorporated, turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 7 minutes. The dough should have a velvety texture. Spritz a piece of saran wrap with cooking spray and place the dough ball on top. Hit the dough with an additional spritz of cooking spray and wrap with the plastic. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Use a pasta machine to roll the dough out in two sheets. Spoon the filling onto one pasta sheet – I used about 1.5 tablespoons per ravioli? They ended up pretty big – I ended up with 13 all together.

Once the filling is spooned onto a pasta, make an egg wash by combining 1 egg white with 1 tablespoon water. Brush the egg wash around the each mound of filling. Take the second pasta sheet, and place it over the filling. Press the pasta together, removing air pockets as you go, and sealing the raviolis. Use a pizza cutter to separate and trim excess.

For the third sheet, place filling on one half, hit it with the egg wash and then fold over and seal.

If you’re making these ahead of time, place raviolis on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and lightly floured and stick in the freezer. Once frozen, place into a Ziploc bag.

Bringing it all together:

Duck Jus

Cracklings

Handful of small crimini muchrooms (or quarter larger ones)

Olive oil

Swiss chard

Duck raviolis

Foie Gras slices (mine came pre sliced, if you have a whole lobe you’ll have to look elsewhere on how to prep it)

Place the mushrooms and a small baking dish and toss with olive oil and salt. Roast in a 400°F oven for 20 minutes. Assuming you made the cracklings and duck jus ahead of time like I did, warm them up in the oven with a few minutes remaining.

For the swiss chard, wash and chop roughly. Add some oil in a pan over medium and saute for 3 to 4 minutes, until wilted, tossing some salt on for good measure.

For the ravioli, bring a pot of well salted water to a boil. Boil the ravioli for 3 minutes (5 if frozen).

For the foie, score on one side with a knife (optional, strictly for presentation purposes – my score marks didn’t turn out super fantastic, but oh well). Salt liberally. Heat a cast iron or other sturdy pan on high – get it really hot now – and sear the foie gras for 30 seconds per side. That’s it, seriously foie gras is that easy to cook (if it comes sliced for you).

Place the chard and raviolis on the plate. Pour over duck jus. Top with roasted mushrooms and cracklings. Place seared foie gras on everything and dig in, because you’ve earned it.

Braised Rabbit with Dijon Mustard Sauce

I’ve never eaten rabbit before, so I figured what the hey. Turns out it tastes a lot like chicken. This is a simple enough braise, and would work well with chicken too. I’ve adapted this from the Staff Meals From Chanterelle cookbook. You’ll notice the side dishes are exactly the same as the poached snapper post I made, because leftovers.

Recipe:

1 rabbit

8 ounces crimini mushrooms, sliced

1 yellow onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, diced

1 cup white wine

3 cups chicken stock

4 sprigs Parsley

5 sprigs Thyme

2 Bay leaves

2.5 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons flour

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Salt and pepper       

Cut the rabbit into pieces – cut off the front legs (they come off pretty easy), then the back legs. You’ll want to pop the joints on those, like if you were taking the legs off a chicken. Chop the loin off from the rib cage, and chop off the bony part. Here’s what you’ll end up with:

Heat a dutch oven over medium high heat. Salt the rabbit pieces, and brown on both sides. Remove to a platter. Turn the heat down to medium, and add the mushrooms, onion and garlic. Cook until the mushrooms have released much of their liquid, 5 to 6 minutes. Add the wine, and reduce by half. Wrap the parsley, thyme, and bay leaves in a piece of cheese cloth, and use butcher’s twine to secure the ends so you have a little bundle.

Add the rabbit and the herb sachet back to the pot, along with the chicken stock. Bring to a simmer, cover, and simmer for 40 minutes, until the rabbit is cooked through.

Remove the rabbit to a platter. Turn the heat up to medium high to get the sauce at a boil. Knead the 2.5 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons flour together in a bowl. Add to the sauce and stir to incorporate. Reduce for about 20 to 25 minutes, until the sauce thickens. Add the Dijon mustard, the lemon juice, and salt and pepper as needed. Add the rabbit back to the sauce to warm it back up.

Bigos - Polish Hunters Stew

This week’s cooking challenge is Polish food, which I know nothing about. Luckily, the internet exists, so I grabbed a recipe from Simply Recipes for a Polish stew called Bigos. Most recipes call for dried porcini mushrooms, but I ended up using some beech, hedgehog, crimini and shitake that were at my vegetable store. Also, if you can find refrigerated sauerkraut, you should use that instead of the canned stuff. If you do need to use sauerkraut from the can, rinse it to remove the vinegary taste.

Typically this recipe uses prunes as well, but I opted to leave those out. You should add them for the last 30 minutes of cooking if you want to use them. There’s also a version using tomato sauce instead of wine.

Bigos:

2 tbsp bacon fat

1 onion, chopped

1 head cabbage (the regular stuff, not red or savoy), chopped

1 lb. mixed fresh mushrooms

1 lb. smoked kielbasa

2 lb. fresh kielbasa

1 smoked ham hock

25 ounce jar of fresh sauerkraut

12 ounces red wine

1 tbsp black peppercorns

1 tbsp caraway seeds

2 tbsp dried marjoram

Salt

Wash the sauerkraut if need be, wash and chop the mushrooms, and cut the kielbasa into pieces.

In a very large pan (I started using a 5 qt dutch oven, but ended up moving everything to my stock pot), melt the bacon grease over medium heat then add the onion and fresh cabbage and sauté for about 5 minutes, until the cabbage is soft. Salt the cabbage while it cooks. Remove the cabbage and onions and set aside.

Add the mushrooms and a little salt so they release their liquid. Once their water is nearly gone, add back in the cabbage and onion, along with all the keilbassa, the ham hock, the sauerkraut, the red wine, and the pepper/caraway/marjoram and some salt.

You’ll notice that there’s very little liquid compared to other stews – Bigos is called a dry stew, and the ingredients will release a lot of liquid as the stew cooks.

Bring the mixture to a simmer, cover and cook on low for 2 hours.

Arzak Eggs with Mushrooms and Polenta

This is a bit fancier than I usually get at breakfast time, but this is a pretty easy dish if you have leftover polenta you’re looking for a use for. The egg technique comes from Juan Mari Arzak, head chef of Spain’s famous Arzak restaurant.

Polenta and Mushrooms:

1 cup uncooked polenta

3 cups water

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

2 tablespoons butter, divided

Crimini mushrooms, chopped

Salt

Bring the water to a simmer in a pot and slowly add the polenta, stirring to incorporate. Add in the salt and rosemary. Turn the heat to low and cook for half an hour, stirring frequently, until the polenta is very thick. Place the polenta into an 8”x8” baking dish lined with parchment paper. Refrigerate for a few hours or overnight.

Cut the polenta into 4 pieces. Heat a frying pan over medium and add the butter. Add the polenta and cook for about 3 minutes per side.

In a separate pan, melt some butter and add the chopped mushrooms. Mine were in smaller pieces so they only took about 5 minutes total to cook. Salt the mushrooms while they’re cooking to help release their water.

Eggs:

4 eggs

Extra virgin olive oil

Salt

Pepper

1.5 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme

Line 4 ramekins with plastic wrap so that there is some overhang. Add a little olive oil, then crack an egg into each piece of plastic. Add a little salt, pepper, and thyme to each egg. Bring the ends of the plastic together to create a bundle. Tie a piece of kitchen twine around each bundle. Tie the other end of the twine to a wooden spoon.

Bring a large pot of water up to a simmer. Add the egg bundles, balancing the wooden spoon on the top of the pot. Let simmer for 4 minutes – you can remove the bundles from water and poke the plastic to check if they’re cooked through.

Serve the mushrooms and eggs on top of the polenta, and grate some parmesan cheese on there for good measure.