Duck Bánh Mì

The bánh mì is everything good about a sandwich. Lots of layered flavor components, all working together in a self-contained torpedo of goodness. It’s a Vietnamese mainstay, born out the French culinary influence imparted to Vietnam during the colonization of the region, then known as Indo-China. A french baguette, filled with roasted meat, pate’, pickled vegetables, and fresh herbs is standard fair, often using pork. This version uses a fat mallard, thats been smoked on the pellet grill until medium rare. I glazed the duck with some orange marmalade during the later portion of cooking and ended up freezing the prepared bird whole, when I had to suddenly take a trip out of town. A few weeks later I pulled the cooked duck from the freezer and made a batch of báhn mì sandwiches for my family.

The is an easy to put together recipe, the only work comes from making some quick pickled veggies with carrot, daikon, and cucumber. Otherwise, just quickly crisp the duck skin, warm the meat through and assemble the ingredients. I found that I was able to get 4 substantial sandwiches from one duck and still have a carcass to throw in the stock pot.

Baguettes are traditional, but they’re hard to come by in my neighborhood. There is however, no shortage of panaderias, so I used bollilo rolls. One more local addition to a sandwich with a complicated history.

Ingredients

whole smoked duck

baguette or hoagie rolls

julienned english cucumber

julienned carrot

julienned daikon radish

fresh cilantro

good mayo

sriracha sauce

hoison sauce

thinly sliced fresh jalapeño

good rice vinegar

sugar

salt

1. First, fill a mason jar with equal parts julienned carrot, daikon radish and english cucumber. I use english cucumbers because that have a higher “meat” to seed ratio. I then remove the pulpy center and only use the firmest part of the cucumber. This will yield a crunchier finished pickle.

2. Next add half a cup of warm water, a quarter cup good quality rice wine vinegar, sugar and salt to the jar. make sure vegetables are covered with liquid. Put a lid on the jar and gently shake until the salt and sugar has dissolved. Place the jar in the fridge and let it rest for at least an hour. This is a quick pickle, but the slightly “funky” aroma of the daikon will give it a bit of a longer fermented flavor.

3. Separate the duck skin from the meat and cut both into very thin strips. Crisp the skin in a cast iron pan on medium high heat. Once the skin has browned and crisped nicely, kill the heat and throw the meat into the pan. Gently stir to incorporate the two together, as well as the produced, rendered fat. This will warm the meat, without pushing it past the palatable stage of doneness.

4. Now its time to assemble your sandwich. Split your baguette (or in this case bollilo roll) and spread mayo on the bottom half. Next pile up a generous portion of duck, topped with hoison sauce. After that comes the pickled veggies, fresh cilantro and depending on you tolerance for heat, jalapeño and sriracha.

5. That’s it. You’ve got a fatty, vinegary, sweet, spicy, crunchy, bad ass sandwich to enjoy. The pickles will keep for weeks in the fridge and get better with a few days of maturation. Once you’ve got them on hand use them to make other iterations of báhn mì as you see fit.

Snow Goose BBQ Confit

Snow geese get a bad wrap when it comes to table fair. Last year a friend told me he thought it was because familiarity breeds contempt. He was referring to the peculiarity of snow goose hunting in that when its good its really good. During the early part of the spring conservation hunt its not uncommon for a group of hunters to transform a hundred or more snows from aerial acrobats to permanent terrestrial residents. More than once I’ve piled high the bed of my truck with birds that other waterfowler’s didn’t want. I’m not complaining. I’m more than happy to fill a freezer with a running ton of goose meat, but there is something exceedingly shameful about folks that participate in only the preliminary parts of the hunting experience. I’ve probably eaten a couple hundred snow geese over the last decade or so and I’m here to tell you they do in fact taste good. I’d argue that most folks couldn’t tell the difference between a skinned out mallard breast and that of a snow when it came down to taste. Yes, there is variance depending on what the birds are eating, but here in Arkansas every single one I ever cooked tasted great.

Snows are the only waterfowl species I don’t pluck (I almost exclusively kill dabblers). To my mind snow goose skin can have a bit of an off taste and as the birds I get here in Arkansas rarely, if ever, have much fat I remove the breasts and the leg quarters sans epidermis. The breast can be used for any “steak” you choose, but the legs and thighs respond best to low and slow cooking to become tender and delicious. This recipe uses the method of confit to accomplish that texture and taste, but adds to it the wonderous alchemizer of smoke. The result is a top shelf BBQ sandwich that tastes fantastic and presents snow goose in a way that’s palatable for just about anyone. I completed the entire cooking cycle on my Traegar pellet grill, but the same could be accomplished with your standard charcoal burning apparatus and an oven.

Ingredients

snow goose leg quarters

rendered fat (duck or pork)

favorite dry rub

BBQ sauce

brioche buns

coleslaw

1. Season leg quarters with your favorite dry rub. It’s important that your seasoning contains salt. This isn’t a problem with most store bought blends, but if you make your own remember to include enough of it. Think of it as seasoning to taste on the front end, don’t go too salty and feel free to err under the premise that less is more. Place meat in a large ziplock bag and refrigerate for 24 hrs.

2. Next, remove the leg quarters and place them on a wire rack in your fridge for at least 4 hours. This is when we’ll let the meat develop a slightly tacky surface which will allow the smoke to stick.

3. Now it’s time to introduce some smoke to the process. I did this on a pellet grill, but feel free to use a traditional smoker or even a basic charcoal grill. You’ve got a couple of options here. You can either place the meat on indirect heat and allow the smoke to permeate the leg quarters for a while or you can opt for a quick smokey sear. The indirect heat method will result in a smokier tasting and softer textured finish product. A quick sear over smokey heat will yield a less intense smoke flavor and and a slightly more “toothsome” quality for the meat. If you go this route there is more room for error so watch the meat intently, flip it mid way and be prepared to remove it from the heat quickly. These are small, lean pieces of meat and they will dry out quickly if you let them. I rocked the Traegar at 450 and it only took around 5 minutes total, but truthfully I wish I had pulled them a minute or so earlier. The confit process can add fat to dry meat, but it’ll never really “rehydrate” it. There’s kind of a fine line you’ll need to ride, so pay attention.

4. Once removed from the grill, the leg quarters should be placed into a heavy cast iron pot. I prefer an enameled one, but really any heavy lidded vessel will work, as long as its oven safe. Stack the meat as efficiently as possible so that the vertical height is as shallow as you can get away with. This will save on the amount of fat you have to use. Now, cover the meat with the rendered, liquified fat of your choice. Duck or goose fat is obviouly top shelf for this, but pork lard will work great as well. In the past I’ve even done confits with reserved bacon grease, but you’ve really got to be mindful of your salt if you go that route. Whichever fat you use just make sure that the meat is completely covered. Sometimes weighing the meat down with a glass bowl or plate can help out in this regard. Set your oven or pellet grill at 200 and allow the goose to gently cook, lid on, for around 4-5 hours. Start checking the meat with a fork around the 4 hour mark and once it’s tender to your liking, you’re good to go. I determined my goose was cooked, right around the 5 hour mark.

5. Pull the meat from the pot, allow the fat to drip off and once cool, pull the meat from the bones. At this point that should be an easy job. I opted to run a knife a few times over the meat before tossing it with a tomato and molasses based sauce. Just use enough sauce to coat the meat and allow it to have a bit of structural integrity when mounded up. I piled the sauced meat up on a buttered and toasted brioche bun, topped it with a hearty dose of my jalapeño-cilatro coleslaw and went to town.

   Yes, you could accomplish a bastardized version of this by covering goose meat in Sweet Baby Rays while it takes a ride in a crockpot, but I promise the results will be indiscriminate. With a few easy preparation steps you can turn the legs and thighs of “flying carp” into table fare that will satisfy any respectable BBQ aficianado. Get more use out of your birds and show your smarter than everyone else by saving the gams and filling your belly

Corned Snow Goose and Cabbage Egg Rolls

In the restaurant business there’s a term … “value added product.” The USDA defines it as “a change in the physical state or form to the product.” That means turning pork bellies into bacon, wheat into flour, or in this case a mess of snow goose breasts turned into Corned Goose and Cabbage Eggrolls. These are easy to make out of the cheapest of ingredients, they’ve got a bit of novelty factor, and they taste ridiculously good.

I’m skipping the instructions on how to corn goose breasts because there are plenty of serviceable recipes out there. Use an insta-cure or a sugar-cure method, whichever you prefer. Beyond that its not much more complicated than assembling a few ingredients and rolling them up in an egg roll wrapper.

For real though, these are good. Really good. People will eat them and they’ll go fast and then they’ll want more. You will become popular and people will want to be your friend. You may soon realize that you have influence and power in circles that a pre-eggroll you could only have imagined. I recommend making a big batch and freezing them in serviceable numbers so you can have them on hand regularly. Take them straight from the freezer to the hot grease and have a super good snack whenever you feel like it.

Ingredients

corned snow goose breast (shredded)

green cabbage

carrots

red onion

whole caraway seeds

egg roll wrappers

coarse ground black pepper

salt

1. Shred your corned goose breast and set the meat aside.
   

2. Slice cabbage, onion, and carrots into thin strips. If you were so inclined you could run the vegetables over a mandolin. Just make sure you don’t go too thin, we are going to quickly sauté the vegetables, but we want them to retain some structural integrity so as not to be mushy.
   

3. Quickly sauté your veg in a large bottomed pot with a neutral oil. At the same time, on a separate burner toast caraway seeds in a hot pan over medium heat. Keep the ingredients of both vessels moving to prevent scorching and kill the heat on both once the ingredients start to darken in color.

4. Salt the veg to taste then add lots of fresh ground black pepper. Add the toasted caraway seeds to the veg mixture, stir to combine, and with the heat off, cover the pot. Make sure you’ve added enough so that you can clearly see the caraway seeds as an ingredient in the mixture. Allow the steam and moisture present to rehydrate the caraway seeds for approx. 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, remove the lid and get a face full of caraway scented steam. Spread the veg on a cookie sheet to stop the cooking process and allow the mixture to cool quickly.

5. Now it’s time to assemble the egg rolls. Lay your wrapper out in front of you oriented like a diamond (as opposed to a square). Fill with equal parts goose and veg, fold the sides in first then roll from one pointy end to the other. Seal the roll with a bit of water applied with your finger. It’ll take 2-3 rolls to get the hang of it, but its a simple affair. I usually end up re-wrapping the first couple because my skills have improved so much by the end of the batch.

6. Fry a few at a time by submerging in 350° oil for about 3 minutes. Mind the egg rolls with tongs while they cook and be ready to turn them midway and hold them in place if the have a penchant for rolling over to one side.

7. That’s it, serve with spicy mustard or homemade Thousand Island dressing. These are great at parties or for hanging out watching a movie on the coach with family. Or as my wife can attest to, stress eating while awaiting election results.