Totally not bread: Confit de canard

Thanks so much :)

David: Thanks! I'm sure you'll have lots of fun with the book. Ruhlman's a great food writer and Brian Polcyn brings years and years of experience to the table. Many consider it to be the best book around on charcuterie for the home cook. Look out for a follow-up book that Polcyn and Ruhlman are working on at the moment - not sure when it'll be out, but Ruhlman have mentioned it in some posts on his blog at ruhlman.com.

Substitute any kind of sweet green bean for the asparagus beans - especially any kind of haricots verts would do!

Thanks for all your kind comments and replies, everyone!

I was also under the impression that to make real tasting duck confit, one had to use proper duck fat to get the right flavour. It makes sense: Use fat and meat from the same animal.

To be honest, I've only had duck confit once before, in a Parisian restaurant two years ago. And boy was it fabulous. I did read a bit about confits before doing it with olive oil instead of the real deal, and many sources suggested that it could be done with e.g. olive oil with great results. I loved my confited duck legs, but my memory is blunt, and I can't compare it to what I had those couple of years ago.

I really welcome a discussion about confit, and hope everyone with experience can weigh in with their thoughts and ideas! Belive me, I trawled the city for duck fat, but the only option I was given was by a butcher who could order it for me at a high cost and with a long delivery time. I was both surprised and disappointed, because duck fat has so many other applications...If I had had duck fat readily available I would definitely have used it instead of olive oil. Then I would've known what it "should" taste like, and be in a better position to compare with olive oil as poaching medium instead.

I promise to try harder next time :)

Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, one of the authors behind the upcoming monster "Modernist Cuisine", has said in a NY Times article that the poaching medium isn't as important as most people think. The choice of fat imparts flavour to the skin, but not the meat itself. Far more important for the flavour, is the ageing or ripening of the meat. Back in the days when the confit was kept for months (meat submerged in hardened duck fat), the meat itself acquired a more distinct flavour as weeks went by. I believe it is McGee, in his book on cooking, who said that a certain "rancidity" was not unheard of, and actually valued.

Dr. Myhrvold expanded a bit on the NYT article in an eGullet forum post:

"The NYT piece only covered this briefly. Here is a better discussion of the issue. Most chefs believe that cooking meat at moderately low temperature (typically 160-180F)submerged in fat - called confit - produces a special flavor and texture profile to the meat. The classic dish is duck leg confit, which was traditionally used to store duck legs - the legs would be salted, then cooked in fat, and after cooking the fat allowed to congeal around the meat which would tend to isolate the meat from air and help it keep longer. Sous vide confit puts some fat in the bag with the meat, and that seems to work very well. I experimented a bit with that (see the sous vide thread, and a thread on duck confit). Sous vide confit is a lot less messy than a big pot of fat, and requires less fat - like a teaspoon full per bag rathre than a pot full. But I wondered if there was really anything to this. I didn't believe that the interior of the meat could actually be affected by being cooked submerged in fat. Fat molecules are way too large to penetrate into the meat. Some people say all sorts of weird things about how confit might work, like the fat forces juices to stay in the meat, but those are like stories of searing meat to "lock in the juices" which have been shown to be wrong. So, we cooked both duck legs, and pork shoulder several ways. Traditional confit style, sous vide confit (with fat in bag), sous vide (without fat in bag), and low temperature steaming (in combi-oven or CVAP, at typical confit temperatures). Cooking times and temperatures were the same between all of the tests. It is easy to see/taste if there is some oil/fat on the meat so after cooking we added some oil or fat to the meat that wasn't cooked confit style. We had one person handle the cooking and plating, and then we did careful taste tests. None of us (trained chefs and sophisticated eaters) could tell which sample was which better than random. Our conclusion is that there is no human perceptable difference in cooking via confit. Yes, this flies in the face of tradition, but LOTS of traditional "knowledge" turns out to be wrong when examined in detail. Some people will have a hard time accepting this. My answer is simple - TRY IT. If have not tried it in a controlled, disciplined and fair way, then there isn't much point in arguing about it, because this is not a matter of opinion or faith - it is a simple experiment."

It's a controversial statement, but I really like Dr. Myhrvold's questioning and will to experiment.

As far as I can tell, important factors with the confit style of cooking is that:

• Meat is cooked very slowly at low temperatures
• Meat is cooked for a long time - not just until the core temperature is right, but it's held there for a long period of time
• When aged, unique flavours develop in the meat ("a certain rancidity")

Even though I poached my duck legs in a cheap olive oil, I could only make out a very, very subtle olive oil flavour to certain parts of the skin. There's a lot of duck fat on the legs themselves to provide the "right" flavour.