Homemade Duck Confit Recipe For Christmas

Homemade Duck Confit Recipe with Onion & Baby Potatoes

For those of you who follow my food blog on a regular basis, you’ll know that I love duck. It’s amazing stuff – and so easy to make … if you have the right ingredients. Roasting Duck requires fresh duck but Duck Confit is something you can keep in your fridge or cupboard for months, even years due to the method used to preserve the duck. Duck confit is a tradition French dish made from the leg of the duck, preserved initially by salt curing the piece of meat before slowly poaching it in its own fat.

It you want to prepare and store Duck Confit yourself (which is quite a laborious but satisfying process), these make amazing Christmas pressies for people. This year, I've made a batch of ten Kilner jars to show my friends the love.

Homemade Duck Confit Recipe

1. Prepare the duck leg by rubbing with salt & garlic
2. You can add further flavour the duck with fresh herbs of your choice (such as thyme, pepper, even chilli)
3. Cover the duck and place in the fridge overnight (for 24 hrs, to enable the salt to cure the duck, helping to preserve it)
4. Preheat an oven to a low temperature (around 170 to 200 Fahrenheit).
5. Brush the salt & herbs off the duck and pat it dry.
6. Place duck in cooking dish that is deep enough to cover the duck in duck fat
7. Slow cook the duck in the over for up to 6 hrs
8. Remove duck from oven and transfer duck leg into a canning jar that has been heat sterilised by boiling
9. Ensure that the duck leg is completely covered in the warm duck fat (do NOT use any of the juices at the bottom of the duck fat), seal the jar & let it cool
10. The duck confit can now be kept in the fridge for several months (or possibly more depending)

Cooking hint: The best cooking speed for most succulent duck confit is a very slow bubble.

Another cooking hint: The duck fat that will have been rendered from the duck it amazing for cooking. If you have some extra left over, put into a smaller sealed canning jar to use later to make amazing roast potatoes.

Roast Duck Confit with Onions & New Potatoes

Of course, this may seem like a lot of time and effort given the fact that you can buy perfectly good canned duck confit. Canned, I hear you ask? You would be surprised how often, when eating at a top quality restaurant, you are being served duck confit from a can. Of course, a can doesn’t have the romanticism of the traditional clay containers that were used in the ‘olde tymes’ (did you know that many of our unusual spellings in modern English are the result of English scribes being sent to France to learn how to write in the medieval  times – and the mis-match of pronunciation against the written language) but it’s a perfectly good way of storing duck confit, because it’s the next stage that really makes the dish.

The traditional way of preparing duck confit is to oven roast the duck legs until the skin is crispy and brown. This takes about 15 to 30 minutes depending on the size of the duck legs and heat.

So here is how to a very simple and sexy way to prepare the duck.

1. Roughly chop 1 large onion, 10 new potatoes so they are roughly the same size
2. Take 3 cloves of garlic and crush roughly
3. Place & shake in roasting pan with a bay leaf, a little olive oil and thyme
4. Remove your duck confit piece & place on top of the vegetables – the duck fat that remains on the duck will melt and coat the vegetables below
5. Roast in the oven for 30 to 45 minutes or until the vegetables are cooked and the skin of the duck confit is crispy and dark brown.

Serve with marmalade jus or other simple sauce (generally a sharp acidic based sauce created from ingredients such as cherries, gooseberries or cranberries work well).