Whew. Another Duck Day done and dusted. I just took my wedding ring off and discovered a leaf of thyme has been hiding under it since some time during the cooking yesterday…?
If you’re new here, “Duck Day” is what corwin calls Thanksgiving, because he always liked duck better than turkey, and when he got to college in the 1980s the first Thanksgiving he cooked himself (with his friend Michael) they made duck. (Hi, Scliff!)
Every year we cook up a theme for this multi-course, plated dinner and we spend the better part of a week prepping, testing, and sourcing. This year’s theme was “Recess” — as in that break in the school day when we were kids when they made us go play outside. Because man, we could all use a break right now.
The menu was arranged like a hopscotch board and the courses were:
- Hopscotch
- Dodge Ball
- Marco Polo
- Hawaiian Punch
- Duck, Duck, Goose
- Double Dutch
Hopscotch: An Opening Cocktail
With a name like “hopscotch” we wanted something scotch-based, but we didn’t really want the cocktail already named that. I wanted something that would warm people up after they came in from the cold, so I wanted something like the hot buttered rum my uncle Tom used to make on family holidays. Why not Hot Buttered Scotch?
We looked up a lot of recipes and the techniques varied wildly from ones where you boil the whiskey and water together with the sugar (??? won’t that boil off the alcohol?) to microwave techniques (NO!) and settled on a technique where you make a sort of batter in advance out of butter, sugar, and spices. (Such as this Spruce Eats recipe or How Sweet Eats.)
The butter base comes out almost like a cookie dough:
3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 cup (4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup agave nectar or honey
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon fresh shaved/grated nutmeg
1 pinch kosher salt
As with eggnog, fresh grated nutmeg is like an entirely different spice from the prepowdered kind. Get a handful of whole nutmegs (say, from Penzeys), microplane one whenever you need it, and you’ll never go back to the powdered stuff.
We had some whiskey-loving friends over to taste-test which Scotch to use, sampling several from our cabinet. (We have a “not drinking” problem, so the alcohol tends to accumulate.) We tried 3 likely scotches and also a version with Drambuie, which was delicious but not what I wanted for this drink. (We did not even attempt to mix it with, say, the Ardbeg Uigeadail, which is the scotch that tastes the most like smoked herring, ever.)
Not too surprisingly, the unanimous winner was a Balvenie 14-year aged in rum casks. “Caribbean Cask” was a perfect match given that this was hot-buttered-rum-adjacent.
The Spruce Eats recipe ratio of water to booze to batter is completely wrong, though. They call for 4:2:1. I found it was best at 1:1:1! One ounce boiling water, one ounce scotch, and a blob of the batter around the size of a tablespoon. Top with a separate pat of salted butter to really enhance the flavor and mouthfeel.
To mix up 11 servings I put the (cold) Scotch and the butter mixture into a Pyrex pitcher, whisked it, then poured the hot water in. The butter and alcohol kept trying to separate so I poured half of the cocktail and then reversed direction to finish the pour, to even it out.
We served it in pre-warmed china teacups (thank you, warming drawer) giving each person their own pat of butter to put on top. It came out strong and sweet and delicious. For the one guest who didn’t want scotch, I warmed up an 2 ounces of almond milk with some bergamot tea syrup and then added the butter mixture and it came out delicious, as well. (I’m thinking I might have that instead of hot chocolate tonight when it gets chilly…!)
Dodge Ball: The Soup Course
So a course with the word “ball” in the name obviously called for something spherical. Have you ever had the Vietnamese style beef balls in pho? Well, of course those can be made with duck. For the past couple of years, corwin has been making Vietnamese style pho broth (typically beef), with the technique where you char the onions before putting them into the stock. (See Serious Eats: Traditional Beef Pho) This works great with duck stock, of course, too.
So, a soup course. (Or you might even call it “soup and salad” since we served it with a daikon and carrot slaw on the side: do chua.)
corwin decided to make something that wasn’t all the way to the squash-ball hard rubber texture of the usual vietnamese beef ball and was more of a cross between that and the softer beef ball you get at dim sum (See Chinese Cooking Demystified for a great version on YouTube — also you should subscribe to their channel, which is fantastic and they never miss). But of course instead of beef, duck.
So the beef (I mean, duck) ball was one ball, but that was not enough. So we decided to add to the soup a dumpling — but not an Asian filled dumpling — instead, a blob of batter that was more like the American “chicken ‘n’ dumplings” dumpling, which cooks in the broth and fluffs up. (Or as corwin calls it, the goy matzoh ball.) The third and final ball was instead of giving folks a lime wedge, as you usually would have on the side of pho, we gave everyone a kalamansi.
Kalamansi are a teensy citrus from the Philippines that is sour like a lime but usually eaten like a kumquat — whole, with the peel, because the sweetness is in the peel. We recently ran out of the yuzu marmalade that corwin cooked some years back, so he bought a new batch, and the supplier he ordered from offered kalamansi by the pound, so we got some. (I think a pound was about 50 kalamansi so we have a lot let over to eat and play with..)
So, every year, some garnish gets forgotten.
My usual strategy for this is to plan more garnishes for the dishes so that if only one gets left off, percentage-wise it’s not that much.
Pho is typically topped with cilantro and thai basil. corwin had managed to snag cilantro microgreens at the last farmers market of the year, but couldn’t find thai basil anywhere. It was sold out everywhere he went.
I did eventually find it at the H-Mart in Davis Square, on Wednesday night. Perhaps amusingly, H-Mart had labeled it “Taiwan Basil” on the shelf, but “thai basil” on the package. (H-Mart is a Korean grocery chain that is staffed here mostly by Spanish speakers from El Salvador and surrounding Central American countries.) I was so pleased to finally get some… and then we completely forgot to put it on the dish. Ah well. It was delicious without it and the cilantro microgreens were lovely.
Paired with Watari Bune junmai ginjo sake. (For a delicious treat: pour yourself a half ounce of sake and a half ounce of hot pho broth — or any other hot salty broth — in the same cup. Way better than a bullshot.)
Marco Polo: The Pasta Course
So we could not resist a children’s game that shares a name with guy who we were all told the myth as kids brought pasta from China to Italy. (The reality is that the Silk Road itself brought noodles westward long before Marco Polo’s travels.)
Perhaps unlike our usual style, we did not make this one an Asian fusion dish and instead went for a straight-up “traditional” ravioli, although corwin invented the filling for himself. What we were picturing is how filled pasta at Giulia (our fave restaurant in the Boston area, which just picked up a Michelin recommendation) is often served, in a flavorful “finishing sauce” that doesn’t have a name.
If you want a connection between Chinese cuisine and Italian cuisine, forget the noodle, how about that dishes are finished in the pan by turning the juices from the ingredients into a sauce by thickening it with starchy water? It’s the exact same technique. In the Flour + Water cookbook the ingredients in most of the recipes are divided into the pasta, the filling, and “to finish.” The finish on pasta dishes is often exactly like the last few steps of a stir fry, where you add a dash of shaoxing wine (or sherry), catch some wok hei (flambe), then add a little cornstarch slurry (starchy pasta water) and simmer until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
To make sure he had enough liquid, corwin reserved the soaking liquid from the porcini mushrooms and the duck drippings from cooking the meat that went into the ravioli filling, and used them both and some butter in his finishing sauce. When it was still too thin, the easy solution was to treat it exactly like a stir fry and ultimately some cornstarch slurry got it the right consistency.
This sauce doesn’t have a name, apparently. It’s not a sugo or a brodo. It’s just “finished.” I suppose in English we could classify it a “gravy,” but no cookbook or recipe I found called it that. It’s not called “gravy” in Chinese cooking either, so far as I know. It just… is itself.
Almost every Duck Day requires the purchase of some new kitchen gadget. This year we acquired a ravioli press. corwin went over to Elmendorf Baking to buy a ravioli stamp and came home with this thing instead:
corwin decided to go with the dough recipe on the back of the ravioli press box, which turned out a very sticky, egg-forward dough. It went through our trusty Atlas pasta machine just fine, but it was so sticky that once pressed into the ravioli mold, the ravioli refused to come out.
It was like the ravioli were glued in. That first batch we had to dig out with our fingers and mash into a kind of ugly dumpling by hand — which we cooked and ate on the spot. Delicious, but I wanted them to look a lot nicer than that.
To get the ravioli press and the pasta dough to work, I went back to my Chinese cooking practice, which is basically when you are making wontons, cover everything in cornstarch. This worked way better. It made for a ravioli that was still a little difficult to get out of the mold, but at least most of them could be extracted without too much damage. Also as the cornstarch got worked into the dough, the dough got a bit drier and stiffer, which made it easier to work with. When we try this again in the future, if the dough seems too sticky, I’ll be emboldened to work in a little extra flour before we start putting it through the machine.
For the filling itself we proceeded using a recipe for a chicken ravioli found in the Flour + Water cookbook to figure out the rough proportions on the duck, mushrooms, and vegetables (carrot, onion) in the filling. The process of making the filling was basically: take 3 duck breasts, skin on, sear them in the bottom of a dutch oven, on both sides, take out and set aside. Then put the finely diced carrot, celery, mushoom, and onion into the rendered fat and simmer until soft. Chop the seared breasts finely (not all the way to “ground” but small enough to glom together somewhat) and then mix it back in with the vegetables and let the mixture chill overnight.
We made the ravioli a day ahead, and kept them in a sealed container separated by wax paper lightly dusted with cornstarch. The bottom layers, which had the least amount of cornstarch, stuck to the paper a little and had to be pried off carefully. My advice: do not skimp on the cornstarch.
One other piece of advice, if you have bought the “compostable plastic wrap” to replace your regular cling wrap for the love of god do not wrap your pasta dough in it to put it in the fridge to chill. It made a horrible mess.
Maybe this was also because the first run of the dough was too sticky, but it glommed onto the dough and the dough could not be fully scraped off. Trying to do so just shredded the cling wrap and embedded bits of it in the dough. Yuck. I had to throw a bunch of the dough into compost as a result.
I bought this compostable cling wrap two years ago and it’s never worked well. Mysteriously, it tears really easily along the length of the roll, but DOESN’T tear well across the roll. This is the exact opposite of what you want…?? You have to use the perforations they have made in it to rip off a sheet. The perforations don’t work very well, though, but meanwhile the piece you’re trying to tear off, rips really easily right up the center… making it useless.
I love the idea of compostable cling wrap, but it seems like there’s a disconnect on making it actually useful. After struggling with it for two years, I’m giving up, and throwing the whole thing away. When I have to chill a ball of dough in the fridge from now on, I’m going to put it in a bowl with a damp kitchen towel on top.
Anyway, the ravioli came out delicious, if very “artisanal” looking. (I’m advocating corwin go back to Elmendorf and get one of the ravioli stamps, as well, where you stamp out one at a time, and we can compare that to the multi-ravioli press next time.)
We paired the ravioli with a really delicious barbaresco (100% nebbiolo) that our wine pusher recommended. (Thanks Kim at Wine & Cheese Cask, where corwin has been buying the Duck Day wines for almost 40 years. Hoy crap we’re old.)
Hawaiian Punch: The Palate Cleanser
Okay, that was two very heavy, very savory starter courses. Time for your juice break at recess.
This was a granita of tropical fruit juices: guava, pineapple, and grenadine (to make it the right color of red). Turns out if you put organic guava and pineapple juice together, you approximate the flavor of Hawaiian Punch pretty well. (corwin also bought some orange juice but ended up not adding it.) To make a granita you spread the juice out in a layer in a sheet pan and put it in the freezer, and then scrape it into crystals every 30 minutes or so. Granita is thus crunchier than sorbet.
After it was fully frozen, we pre-divided it by filling tiny teacups with it, and kept those in the freezer overnight so they were ready to go.
The photos don’t quite capture how tiny the cups are, but they’re only about an inch in diameter.
Duck, Duck, Goose: The Main Course
Thus we arrive at the main course, and the initial anchor thought of this menu, which was how can we work a goose into this duck-themed menu? Of course, let’s have a course called “duck, duck, goose” and serve duck two ways, plus a goose in a ducky fashion!
So this was just like making peking duck, but with a goose, which is very similar to a duck, except bigger. We have done this with a goose once before for a dinner party, and we’ve made peking duck plenty of times in the past. Kenji Lopez Alt has a very good rundown on how to prepare the duck in advance with maltose syrup on the skin.
Kenji’s recipe also includes a good description of how to make the “mandarin pancake.” I’ve been making these since I was a kid and my mother decided we should make Peking Duck for Christmas Eve dinner. As usual when she told our Chinese and filipina friends we were making the pancakes by hand, they told us we were nuts and should just buy them in the store. But they really taste so much better when you make them yourself.
The storebought ones never taste like anything to me, or if they do, they taste like the plastic bag they come in. These are also the same pancakes for making mu shi pork at home. (Mu shi or moo shi pork now appears to be spelled moo shu or mu shu everywhere, but when I was a kid it was always spelled “shi” even though everyone pronounced it “shu.”)
Traditional Peking Duck accompaniments include scallions made into brushes: you cut section of the white or whitish-green part, slit the end, and then soak in an ice bath and the ends will curl up. Slivered cucumbers: corwin bought a new mandoline and made these with it. (Usually I just do it with fine knife skills.) And the plum sauce / hoisin sauce, which corwin always makes himself starting with bourbon soaked prunes.
The two duck accompaniments in “duck, duck, goose” we decided to make a duck fried rice, using a duck egg yolk omelet and duck bacon, and a duck consomme. The duck consomme was meant to be straight-up drunk from a teacup. It’s apparently a very Cantonese thing to give people some hot broth at the end of a meal, under the Chinese medicine principle you should prime the compost heap that is your tummy into working more efficiently by giving it something hot. It was sooooooo delicious.
This was a big heavy course, really multiple courses in one, and it’s fun to eat, with each person building their own Peking Duck “soft tacos” with their preferences for how much of each ingredient. I gave each person one brush to start with, but brought out many extras since some people like to eat the entire brush.
The only drawback to this course is that it takes a long time to carve up the goose, so the pancakes inevitably get cold (as does the goose). Short of hiring a Cantonese chef to slice it up, I don’t see any way to speed it up, really.
Duck and goose pair well with a Gewurztraminer wine, and this was no exception.
Double Dutch: The Dessert Course
This name obviously suggested “chocolate two ways” to me. Keeping with the theme of childhood favorites, I wanted to try to create my own version of Pocky, and my mother and I were talking about how she used to often bring a dessert to parties that was a big tray of crepes filled with chocolate mousse.
The first attempt at Pocky was to try to solve the question of how do you, as a home cook, create something as skinny and straight as real Pocky? Several recipes I looked at (for example: What to Cook Today or Food 52) suggested using a piping bag to pipe out a cookie batter. So I tried that method first, but the resulting stick, although it was crispy and thin, tasted more like a cookie than I wanted. I wanted something more like a breadstick.
Also of note: the recipes called for piping with the number 7 Wilton tip. I think that’s way too thin and there’s no way that batter would make it through. I used the number 10 tip and it was still a struggle and I was worried the seam of the piping bag was going to blow out.
Final note: I discovered while doing this that a tall plastic “stadium” cup is the perfect stand for holding up a pastry bag to be filled. How have I never seen this trick before? I cannot be the only person who likes both taking the overpriced “collectible” cup at stadiums and who likes baking and decorating. Right?
Anyway. Moving on from the cookie style…
Since what I wanted flavor-wise was more like a breadstick, I then tried a “grissini” (skinny Italian breadstick) recipe (101cookbooks.com) using the milk and butter version (not olive oil). Although the results were not as skinny or straight as I might have liked, the flavor and the crunch were very pleasing. (With my RSI I can’t roll dough as well as I used to.)
I baked two batches, one at the 300 degree temperature suggested by the recipe, and after 30 minutes they were still totally “blond” so I upped it to 325 and left them in for another 5-6 minutes. Then I did a second batch at 325 from the start and it still took about 30 minutes of baking. (I suspect my oven is slightly under temperature.)
I then got out the chocolate tempering machine, tempered a batch of Trader Joe’s 72% dark chocolate, and went to town coating the mini breadsticks. When I was done with those, I still had a lot of chocolate in the machine, so I dipped all the cookie sticks, too. Then I discovered I liked the cookie sticks a lot better when I sprinkled the chocolate with crunchy flakes of sea salt.
Sea Salt Pocky is not a flavor I’ve ever seen in the store, but from now on is my favorite flavor.
For the mousse-filled crepes, I took the mousse from one recipe (Food Network), and the crepe from another (Baking with Nessa: Paul Bocuse’s Chocolate Swirl Crepes).
My complaint about a lot of chocolate mousse, including the one corwin used to make back in the 1990s, is that they just are not chocolately enough. (He used to add some instant coffee to the recipe to “make it richer” and to me it never worked, it just made it taste like coffee. Blechhhh.) Well, I’m happy to report that starting with 6 ounces of melted Trader Joe’s 72% dark chocolate, the mousse in fact comes out plenty chocolately, plenty rich.
The Foundations of French Pastry book we have describes 3 separate techniques of making chocolate mousse, none of which are this one! The Food Network recipe has you combine melted chocolate, a sabayon of cream, sugar, and egg yolks, and whipped cream to make the mousse. Here’s the entire text of the recipe: “For the mousse filling, melt the chocolate to 104 to 113 degrees F. In another bowl combine sugar, yolks, and 6 tablespoons cream, and whisk well over simmering water to cooking to thicken, making a sabayon. Whisk half the whipped cream into the chocolate, then fold in the sabayon. Add remaining whipped cream and fold in, then chill, until ready to use.”
My additional notes: I decided to whip the cream first, in the KitchenAid. THEN Melt the chocolate to 113 and make sure its actually all melted. I melted it in a glass bowl over a simmering pot of water since I had to do the next step over the same pot ayway. If I were doing it again I’d melt the chocolate in the largest bowl with the sabayon in the medium sized bowl. If you arm gets tired easily, you might want to try an electric hand mixer on the sabayon? I had to pass off whisking duty to corwin for a while.
It’s hard to tell when to quit cooking the sabayon. When we hit 145 degrees and it seemed pretty fluffy, we stopped. If I do it again, I might whip the cream a little harder before folding it in, until the peaks are stiff. It’s easy to overdo whipped cream and end up with accidental butter, so be careful, though.
In the end, there was a teeny bit of chocolate not completely melted… or it rehardened a little? The mousse at the very bottom of the bowl went into mine and corwin’s crepes and I think it was only in ours. I found the little blobs delicious but corwin though it was unexpectedly “gritty.”
Still was the best chocolate mousse I’ve ever made, and possible the best I’ve ever had.
These crepes do come out pretty thick. I had opted for the Nessa/Bocuse recipe because not only would it look amazingly cool, it had proportionally less egg in the recipe and I didn’t want a dessert crepe to come out eggy. But I am pretty sure the version my mom used to make came out a lot thinner, which meant they could be rolled thinner, too.
For the dark swirl on the crepes, I used the black cocoa from Momo Cocoa that is also the right one to use for oreo style cookies and ice cream sandwiches. (Sadly, it appears Momo Cocoa closed after a July 2024 fire at their home office and hasn’t reopened. King Arthur has a black cocoa on their website but it’s out of stock.)
I funneled the cocoa-flavored batter into a squeeze bottle to make it easy to draw the swirl. Trying to do it with a small ladle would be way too difficult.
The only real mistake I made was one where I didn’t remember to spray the oil onto the pan before putting the batter in, and so it stuck and tore in half (but I glued it back together with mousse). With one broken one and one last one that was more chocolate than regular (see photo for the one weird one) we got exactly 11 crepes out of the recipe.
For the second year in a row we stuck to our schedule, sitting down to eat at 8pm and finishing dessert before midnight. This is partly doable because we no longer go overboard with too many courses (now that none of us eat as much as we did when we were younger), and also we no longer try to serve as many guests at the meal as we used to. (We now typically do 12-14 people rather than 20-24.)
The real key to staying on schedule, though, is making sure everything is prepped beforehand. That meant things like at 2pm the butter pats for the opening cocktail were already portioned out onto bits of paper. Vegetables already washed and cut. Batters mixed. Etc. Figuring out what is crucial to do a la minute for flavor and freshness versus what can be done ahead, and designing a menu with a balance.
Thanks to Claudia and Regis for many of the photos, since I often get too busy cooking and plating to remember to take pictures. Also to Lauren and Scliff!
