2011 Cooking Club Week 26: Tea Smoked Duck

This is a recipe for a version of Zhangcha Duck, or tea smoked duck, a popular banquet dish in the Szechuan province of China. The smoking technique used here is hot smoking. It’s not difficult, and it does impart an interesting flavour, and once you’ve tried it once you’ll keep having a go. The most important thing is not to burn the arse out of your wok, and not set your smoke alarms off, but hopefully you’ll do neither.

You can use smoking to impart flavour to any meat – I’m using duck here, but you can do this with chicken breasts if duck breasts are obscenely expensive or too hard to source. Use them skin on, bone out, and leave out the dry spice marinade because it’ll be too strong a flavour for chicken.

The other thing to note here is that hot smoking doesn’t give you crispy skin. If you want crispy skin on your duck breasts, you need to fry them, skin side down, to get the effect. You can do the crisping bit before or after the smoking, but if you want a lot of the fat to render off the duck breasts, I would advise you not to apply the spice marinade to the skin, smoke first, and finish the breasts skin side down on a hot pan until the skin is as crispy as you want it.

There is some marinating time on this dish, but the cooking time is relatively short so it can be a weeknight dinner if you get organised and start the wet marinade that morning.

Ingredients:




Two duck breasts

Wet Marinade

2 tablespoons rice wine, or dry sherry if you can’t find rice wine
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
2 teaspoons sesame oil
About ½ tablespoon ginger, grated and pummelled to a paste

Dry spice marinade

2 tablespoons Szechuan peppercorns
1 tablespoon sea salt

Smoking Mix

20g of tea leaves - you can use green tea leaves, jasmine tea leaves, for this I’ve used a strong black tea blend that includes Assam, Ceylon and Darjeeling – it needs to be tea, it needs to be leaves, and you won’t get the same effect cutting open teabags and decanting the dust that passes for tea out of them, so don’t even try it.

60g raw jasmine rice

3 tablespoons of dark brown sugar

1 stick of cinnamon or cassia, broken into pieces




Method


Score the skin on your duck breasts in a diagonal pattern, but don’t cut deeply enough to go into the meat. Combine the wet marinade ingredients, (sherry, soy, sesame oil and ginger) in something like a sandwich bag. Put the scored duck breasts in the bag and work the marinade into them, and then leave them in the fridge for the day (or at least two hours).





A little over an hour before you’re ready to cook them, take the duck breasts out of the fridge and prepare your dry spice mix.


Put the Szechuan pepper and the salt into a skillet and dry roast them over a gentle heat for a few minutes until fragrant. Keep watch so they don’t burn.





When they’re fragrant and have begun to pop a bit, take them off the heat. Tip into a mortar & pestle and grind.





Remove the duck breasts from the wet marinade. Pat them dry, and then rub the ground spice mixture into them. *NB: this spice mixture burns quite quickly if you want to fry your duck skin to crisp it up, so you may want to rub the mixture on the meat only, not the skin. Either way you’ll get plenty of flavour. Leave the duck breasts sitting in the spice rub for about an hour.


When you’re ready to cook the duck, prepare your wok for the smoking process.


Mix the ingredients for the smoking mix in a bowl to ensure they’re well mixed up – that’s the sugar, rice, tea and cinnamon or cassia. (You can put all sorts of things in a smoking mix, including dried orange peel and star anise, to name two things that work well with duck.)


Line your wok with a double layer of heavy tinfoil. Pack the smoking mix down on the foil. If you have a metal rack, place it over the smoking mix. I don’t have a metal rack, so I just put wooden chopsticks across the wok to balance the meat on – it needs about an inch clearance minimum. The ends of the chopsticks will get a bit singed so for the love of God don’t use plastic.





For the purpose of this dish, I fried my duck breasts, skin side down, in a pan for three minutes before balancing them, skin side up, across the chopsticks. As stated, you don’t have to do this and you can crisp the skin after the smoking. Duck can be very fatty and it’s hard to get the fat to render off the breasts in the short time you have to put them in a pan without overcooking the duck, so just keep it in mind.





With the lid off, place the wok over a high heat until a steady stream of smoke starts to come from the smoking mixture. When that happens, put a lid on the wok and turn the heat down to medium. Smoke the duck breasts for 8 minutes. I have a pretty air-tight range of lids that I can use in my wok – you want to keep as much of the smoke in as possible. If you don’t have an airtight lid, use a lot of tinfoil in the wok in such a way that allows you to fold the foil in over the lid to achieve a seal.





That’s a glass lid, so you can see my duck breasts are obscured by sweet and flavoursome smoke.


Don’t take the lid off, don’t touch the wok – a glass lid is great because you can make sure there is still smoke in the wok and that the heat hasn’t dropped too low to create smoke.


When the eight minutes is up, turn off the heat or remove the wok from the heat source, but don’t touch the lid. Leave the duck breasts to rest in the covered wok, where they’ll continue to absorb smoke, for about 10 minutes. (Less if you like them rare – a resting time of 8-10 mins will give you medium.)


When you finally take the lid off, smoke and steam will come out. Your duck breasts are ready to eat. The smoking mix will be a solid mass of melted sugar and black spices but you should be able to lift it out of the wok in one piece on the foil when it’s cool, and bin it without having destroyed your wok.





You can serve this with anything you want – steamed rice and stirfried Asian greens is a nice idea, but I like to slice it finely and simply eat with chopsticks and a dipping sauce (in this pic the choices are hoi sin, and a mango chilli sauce that’s sweet and then kicks like a mule).