Chintatown Style Roast Duck

Update:  My girlfriend just said "who's howard the duck?"  Ugh.

I love duck and grew up eating chinatown ducks that my dad would pick up on the weekends, but I've never tried to replicate that style and flavor.  I usually just do a simple roast on a v rack and maybe add a tangy fruit based glazing sauce at the end.  But since we picked a duck up on sale yesterday, i'm gonna try the chinatown style based mainly on this recipe http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/chinatown-steamed-and-roasted-duck-recipe/index.html .  Updates to follow.

Update:
So the recipe I'm basing this on calls for 5 spice power which I don't have and couldn't find in the closest grocery so I decided to try making my own.  Here's the ingrdients:

• 1 tsp. ground Szechwan pepper
• 1 tsp. ground star anise
• 1-1/4 tsp. ground fennel seeds
• 1/2 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. ground white pepper
  

I didn't have szechuan pepper, which isn't really like regular peppercorns and are a pepper "pod" so i substituted a mexican pequin chili pod.  I didn't have white pepper so i used black, and I didn't have fennel seeds (i do somewhere but couldn't find them) so I skipped it.  I used the coffee grinder to grind it all up.  Its an intense spice mix.

Then I needed to trim some excess skin from the duck, pull out the heart, liver and neck (heather used the neck and trimmed skin for a simple pate which turned out well and she'll blog about later).  Then I applied the spice and steamed on the stove top as per the recipe.  I also tied the legs with some rolled up aluminum foil, which is a good trick when you don't have kitchen twine.  And I never have kitchen twine.  Aluminum foil is the duct tape of the kitchen.  Everyone has some, you can make almost anything out of it and nerds love it.

The next problem was the glazing sauce which called for rice vinegar and honey.  Once again, don't have 'em and didn't feel like going to find 'em on a tuesday night so i substituted a chinese Shao Xing cooking wine and balsalmic vinegar and brown sugar.  I also added some crushed garlic cloves to the glaze while it cooked since I didn't put any in the duck cavity as suggested.  Once the steam was done, i applied the glaze and started the roast, with 3 more glazin applicaations over the course of cooking.  Its about to come out of the oven now, so I'll be back with photos and final verdict soon.  I'm guessing the substitutions I made won't be a problem.  Its hard to screw up duck.

Update:  So here's the duck after one glaze and 20 minutes in the oven.

And here's the final product.

The flavor of the glaze and skin turned out great.  It wasn't as crispy as I would have liked it after 1 hour, but I also didn't want to overcook it.  The over was at 375 and I think our over runs a bit on the cool side, so I should probably have turned it up a bit but with the sweet glaze it could burn pretty quickly so i erred on the side of caution there.  Them itself was very tender, and actually a little too soft.  It was packaged in a brine solution so I think that's the culprit.  If possible I recommend buying non-brined.  Brining brings flavor and helps meat retain moisture during cooking so it doesn't dry out during a long roast, but duck's have so much fat and flavor its not really necessary and certainly not for how ever many days since it was packaged.  That long a brine can break down the muscle and make it mushy.  Overall, I was happy with the recipe and felt like it did a good job of reproducing the flavors of a china town duck.  Only big difference is the skin wasn't as crispy, but to get that effect I think you need to spend a day letting the skin dry and/or blowing the skin out to separate it from the meat.

Bon Appetit.