Roasted duck breast on peas puree
All the recipes I shared with you recently don’t require any special equipment or spices. What’s more, they are very simple, with different texture and different presentations. The goal was to help you enjoy and experience food in a different, hedonistic way. That is, „the way a French person would like it.“
This roasted duck breast on peas puree – is the same. More precisely, this is duck’s meat on two purees – peas and potatoes. A good plate should not consist of many different ingredients, but many different textures.
components
- 300-400 gr of duck breasts
- 500 gr uncleaned peas
- 300- 400 gr of potatoes
- 1 garlic clove
- 1/4 of a teaspoon of cumin
- 1/8 of a teaspoon of ginger
- 100 gr butter
- a bit of whole fat milk or cooking cream
- salt, pepper
- 1 teaspoon of clarified butter
Instruction
- Cut the duck breasts, on the skin side, lengthwise and crosswise, but at an angle, so that you get rhombuses. Put enough salt and pepper, and leave the meat for 1 hour on room temperature.
- Wash and clean the potato. Cut it into larger chunks and put into cold water together with a garlic clove.
- Once the water boils and the potato is boiled, strain it and mash into a puree, together with garlic clove. Add about 30-50 gr of butter and mix everything together.
- Add a bit of cooking cream (heated), ginger, salt, cumin and mix it all again. Then, mash through a sieve to get a smooth and shiny puree texture.
- Clean the peas, keep a few pods for the decoration.
- Blanch the peas (and the pods you left for the decoration) for a few minutes in boiling water, and then shock them with cold water.
- Put the peas into a blender and blend them for a puree. To blend the peas more easily add a bit of milk or cooking cream or water from boiled potato (1 spoon, not more) Salt and pepper it. I saved a few peas for the decoration. While decorating, I seasoned them and put them for a bit on clarified butter for additional shine.
- Roast the duck in a well heated pan, first on the side of the skin for about 5-8 minutes depending on the size of your piece. When the skin gets its golden-brown colour, you can turn duck breast piece on the other side and roast for a few minutes more.
- Once the duck is roasted, leave it be for 5-7 minutes, and then cut into pieces the way you want it.
- For the crispy potatoes decoration I used 1/2 of smaller (raw, not boiled) potato which I cut on a 1 mm mandolin and baked on medium temperature in a pan which I later used for the duck meat.
- Everything is ready to serve now.
So, I combined two purees, that is, two different creamy structures – potatoes to make it crispy, blanched, and spicy young peas to give it freshness. And I added meat that gives the dish juiciness with its crispy crust. In total, 3 ingredients.
Is every potato good for a puree?
Of course not.
In France, you can find dozens of different types of potatoes and each one has its own use. Every type has its name and in the greatest number of cases, you can find them in grocery stores under those precise names.
These are just some of them: Annabelle, Charlotte, Amandine, Cherie as more solid potatoes used for steam cooking, salads, braising…Then you have Agata, Monalisa, Samba which can be used both for braising and for puree. The softest ones are Bintje, Caesar, Manon, Marabel….which are for puree, oven baking, French fries…
Tips and Tricks for cooking potatoes
If a potato is not too big, it’s best to cook it with the peel, which you previously cleaned well with a kitchen brush and the harsh side of the sponge. You can make a puree out of boiled potatoes, potatoes cooked on steam, potatoes baked in the oven with aluminum foil…
While preparing potato puree, the potatoes should not be cut into perfect little cubes, because the entire starch leaves the potato during boiling (this is the foam that gathers on the surface of a pot in which we are boiling the potatoes) and then the puree will be elastic like a gum.
The salt should be added at the end, do not salt the water in which the potato is boiled.
Nothing good will come out of wanting to do something quickly. This is the lesson we should have already learned and repeated at least a few times. The potato that has to be boiled, should be put into cold water, not warm or hot.
The milk you pour into the potato while making puree should be the same temperature as the potato. So, warm up the milk previously.
Spice the puree differently
Butter is indispensable because it gives the creamy structure. For the milk part, you can put milk or sour cream or cream.
You can also put some of this:
– cumin
– garlic
– Provencal mixture
– peppers
– coriander
– shallot onion
– ginger
– nutmeg
– chili powder,
– Tarragon,
– rosemary,
– Curry
– sprouts, lemon juice, white pepper
These are some of the perfect ideas for a potato puree with different flavours.
Peas puree
Once you clean the peas, they should be blanched in boiling water for a few minutes, and then shock it with ice water (you can put it in ice) to preserve the green colour.
Then, mix them in a mixer or blender. After this step, if the texture is not very creamy, you can mash it through a sieve, so that the bad parts are separated.
Butter, milk, and dairy stuff can or do not have to be used. I didn’t put any of that this time, but I added a teaspoon of water from the cooked potato, to mix the peas more easily.
If you want to get more intense green colour, do it with the help of parsley, coriander, dill, or spinach. Try it out, your peas will go to a different dimension with these additional flavours, and duck-recipe becomes irresistible.
Salt and white pepper are a must.
Roasted Duck breast recipe
Roasted duck breast-meat requires special attention in preparation, the same as a steak or lamb chops. Ideally, it should be pink the whole length.
Don’t remove the skin and fat because they give the flavour to the duck.
Cut at an angle in two directions before every roasting, to get rhombus. Try not to cut the meat.
Then, put the salt and pepper and leave it to sit on room temperature for 1 hour before roasting.
In this way, you give salt the time to get deeper into the meat and become tastier.
It’s very ungrateful to speak about how much time the meat should be roasted on one or the other side, because it depends on many factors, such as the type of pan, size of the pan, your heating body, the very meat, that is its thickness and size. But, the general guidelines would be 5-8 minutes on a well-heated pan on the side of the skin. The skin should be crispy after roasting. Then, it should be turned on the other side and roasted for another 3-5 minutes.
In any case, you should check the progress of the roasting.
