Duck Debate: Crisp Or Juicy? Washington Post

[Gifted Gourmet]

article from the Washington Post

Crisp skin or juicy meat?To my astonishment, I discovered in our personal library no fewer than 28 methods for roasting duck..  chef Eileen Yin-Fei Lo describes inflating a raw duck with a bicycle pump before hanging the bird up to dry for 12 hours.  Marcella Hazan, an authority on Italian cooking, hews to a modified Chinese approach. Picture her bent over her duck with a hair dryer after the duck has been scalded in boiling water on its tortured path to the oven. In New Orleans, chefs have been known to roast duck for five hours or more at a low temperature, then tear it to pieces, throwing away the skin and bones.

and you? crispy or juicy?

I prefer the former ...

[Kent Wang]

Both.

[jsolomon]

Both.

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Truer words have never been written.

[I_call_the_duck]

Yes.

[Gifted Gourmet]

Maybe I ought to have inquired "how did you like the article?" in order to get more than one word responses ...

[mizducky]

As I too also like my duck both crispy and juicy, I'm slightly dismayed that Mr. Bruske insists it just can't be done. I will allow that it must be tricky, as I've had a lot of duck that didn't exhibit both qualities, and have had no luck so far replicating that at home. But I have eaten duck that did achieve both crispiness and juiciness, so I'm still on a quest to figure out how it's done.

[jsolomon]

I've really had no problems getting both crispy and juicy, tender at the same time.

The 300F oven in the first recipe works well, but 350 is not high enough for the second part of the cooking. I tend to do 300F for 3 hours and 450 or 500 til the skin is lovely.

What I like better is the Alton Brown method. Steam the duck in a stovetop steamer, and then finish in a skillet in the oven.

Alton Brown method.

Honestly, why are people afraid to take their ovens beyond 375?

[mizducky]

I've really had no problems getting both crispy and juicy, tender at the same time.

The 300F oven in the first recipe works well, but 350 is not high enough for the second part of the cooking.  I tend to do 300F for 3 hours and 450 or 500 til the skin is lovely.

What I like better is the Alton Brown method.  Steam the duck in a stovetop steamer, and then finish in a skillet in the oven.

Alton Brown method.

Honestly, why are people afraid to take their ovens beyond 375?

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Heh. Because the last time I tried it--doing Alton Brown's duck method, as a matter of fact--I totally smoked out the house and had to quickly find the stepladder to take the battery out of the smoke detector. There's a reason the WP article advises to clean one's oven *before* duck-cooking, and now I know it!

Alas, the smoke biz so unnerved me that I wound up finishing my Alton Brown-style duck on the top of the stove, which was still nice but hardly, I think, a fair trial of AB's method.

The oven in this place is pretty much of a disaster anyway--thermostat is so off that even with a purchased oven thermometer it's nigh impossible to regulate (it's the Heisenberg oven! Any attempt to take its temperature sends it caromming off in some other thermal direction!). It doesn't help that the poor thing has no self-clean function and I loathe cleaning ovens with those sprays--ick.

I'll certainly give the AB duck another go, but not until I've moved, and have a kitchen with an oven that behaves a bit better (not to mention a proper vent fan!).