Sous Vide Duck Breast With Spicy Champagne-Raspberry Reduction Sauce
Perfectly cooked duck breast topped with a bright, flavorful sauce that is sure to impress
Enjoying tender, flavorful duck breast and a bright, punchy sauce is the perfect way to celebrate the start of a new year. For the resolution-aware, just remember that this recipe contains a fair bit of sugar.
Like I’ve said before, waterfowl skin is the bacon of winged critters. So much flavor and juiciness resides in that skin. Because of this, it makes so much sense to pluck the breasts of your wild waterfowl. The entire process should not take more than five minutes. Once the breasts are plucked, butchered, and brined, dry them off and vacuum seal them with the ingredients below in order to enjoy this outstanding dish.
Duck Breast Cooking Techniques
This recipe calls for three popular wild game cooking techniques: using a sous vide, reverse-searing, and properly resting the meat.
A sous vide is a wand-shaped kitchen device that regulates a water bath to a tenth of a degree. This allows you to cook wild duck breasts perfectly and have the meat simmer in its own delicious fat. This recipe here, with the sous-vide method alone, is almost like duck breast confit. Then, the reverse sear follows the low, slow cook in the sous-vide bath. The blast of heat crisps up the skin and allows for carryover to take effect. Carryover is key in order to avoid overcooking any meat, but especially wild game.
Because of its lean nature, wild game—and all its potential—suffers when overdone. Allowing duck breasts to rest, loosely tented with aluminum foil, means the juices will properly redistribute throughout the muscle fibers while the hot exterior of the meat will continue to cook the center. This results in precisely perfect medium-rare duck breast.
My new favorite thing is to also garnish sliced duck breasts with just a little bit of coarse sea salt. Doing so adds a crunchy texture and also helps open up our tastebuds, allowing us to enjoy this dish’s rich, savory, and slightly sweet tastes.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consider this your start-of-the-new-year reminder to chew slowly when eating wild waterfowl. Steel shot can result in a hefty dentist bill that you’ll spend the rest of the year paying off.
Sous Vide Duck Breast With Spicy Champagne-Raspberry Reduction Sauce
Equipment
- Sous vide cooker
Ingredients
For the duck
- 2 wild duck breasts plucked with skin on
- Kosher salt
- Black pepper freshly cracked
- 4 large cloves fresh garlic smashed
- 1 sprig fresh thyme
- 1 sprig rosemary
- 1 sprig sage
- 1 sprig oregano
- ½ medium Honeycrisp apple sliced
- 4-5 whole anise stars
- ½ cup white wine
- Olive oil
For the sauce
- 2 medium shallots thinly sliced lengthwise
- 1 tbsp salted butter
- 2 large cloves fresh garlic finely minced
- ½ tsp fresh ginger minced
- ¼ cup sparkling wine
- 6-7 ounces raspberry preserves
- ¼ cup chicken stock
- ¼ cup port wine
- 1 tsp chili crisp
- Zest from half an orange
- Handful of fresh raspberries
For the garnish
- Coarse sea salt
- Fresh basil cut chiffonade
Instructions
- Lightly salt and pepper the duck breasts. Seal the breasts, garlic, fresh herbs, apple slices, anise stars, and white wine into a vacuum-sealed bag. Cook in the sous vide bath at 105 degrees for 2 hours.
- After one hour has passed, start the sauce. Heat a skillet on medium-low. Add the salted butter. Once it has melted, add the sliced shallots. Lightly salt and pepper.
- Stir the shallots, cooking until they’re slightly seared and soft. Add the freshly minced garlic and ginger and stir for 5 more minutes. Deglaze the pan with the sparkling wine. Simmer for 5 minutes.
- Add raspberry preserves, chicken stock, port wine, chili crips, and orange zest. Turn the heat to low and allow it to reduce until it’s thick and sticky. Once there, turn off heat. Rinse fresh whole raspberries and add them to the skillet with the sauce.
- After 2 hours in the sous-vide bath at 105 F, pre-heat a skillet or grill to a piping-hot 600 to 700 degrees F. Remove the vacuum sealed bag and cut it open. Thoroughly pat-dry the duck breasts until dry; dry meat makes for a better sear.
- Once dry, add the duck breasts skin-side down to the piping-hot skillet or grill, sear for 1 minute, then flip. Sear for 1 more minute, then remove them from the grill, lightly drizzle them with olive oil, and loosely tent them with aluminum foil.
- Allow the duck breasts to rest for 10 minutes. To serve, add sauce to the bottom of the dish and add the sliced duck on top. Top the duck with a bit of coarse sea salt and fresh basil. Enjoy!
Nutrition
