Craig LaBan tests his cooking skills with duck recipes from Philly chefs

I owe our first duck to Doug’s fridge. My good friend and neighbor had decamped to California last spring for the first few months of the pandemic lockdown to be with his kids, and he’d graciously left his kitchen at our disposal. Our little row house was jammed with the daily necessities to feed my family of four three meals a day. But Doug’s fridge — rarely crowded during even normal times — beckoned with roomy, well-lit shelves that conjured visions of beer storage and beyond: some cooking projects I’d long hoped to tackle. Brining and dry-aging big cuts of meat for days on end? It suddenly seemed possible.

The opportunity presented itself early when Green Meadow Farm, the Lancaster farm and wholesaler that transformed itself into a public retailer during the shutdown, began offering whole Muscovy ducks as an add-on to its weekly CSA boxes. Ducks? I’ve always loved them for the richness of their red meat, the luxurious crisp of their well-rendered skin, and the diversity of international dishes they star in, from simple roasts to lusty braises, stir fries, fat-simmered confit, and earthy soups. An Instagram post of grilled duck with a maple-vermouth agrodolce from former Osteria chef de cuisine, Brad Daniels, caught my eye. Could I possibly make that, too?

Daniels’ reply: “Yes!” Especially if I had spare chilling space for the days-long preparation. Hello, Doug’s fridge!!!

Cooking duck can be more intimidating than chicken. And aside from my stint working at a cooking school in Burgundy, where we’d feed the caretaker’s ravenous flock of quackers leftover scraps from the day’s lessons (and then eventually cook them), I have mostly left preparing duck to pros who’ve mastered the techniques to handle the bird’s copious fat and assure its potentially tough meat stays tender.

» READ MORE: THE RECIPES: Pick up your duck game with these 6 recipes from Philly chefs

With restaurant meals temporarily off the table last spring, though, my mind would sometimes daydream over some favorite duck encounters from years past — the duck for two with grains of paradise and plantain caramel at Friday Saturday Sunday; the duck terrines and nutmeg-scented Swedish duck meatballs at Royal Boucherie; the Thai-curried duck at Kalaya; the juniper-marinated duck with caramelized apples and smoked duck sauce at Andiario; the glorious storefront windows of Chinatown duck houses hung with rows of lacquered birds; and my favorite Peking duck at Margaret Kuo’s in Wayne, where its dining room arrival is announced with a gong and a cleaver-wielding chef who chops it tableside into a pile of luscious, meat-stuffed pancake rolls smeared with hoisin, crunchy skin, and snappy scallions.

No way was I going to undertake the elaborate procedure of Peking duck as my first home endeavor. Or the deboning mastery required for a French duck ballotine or chef Ange Branca’s stuffed Eight Treasure Cantonese duck.

Daniels’ grilled duck was a perfect place to start for many reasons. To begin with, the chef, who’s planning to open his first restaurant in Montgomery County this spring, reassured me that although a duck is no doubt a splurge (around $30-plus for a 5-6 pounder), a whole bird can easily be turned into at least three meals with elemental butchery and cooking skills. A large split breast can be the centerpiece of a meal for four. The legs and wings can be transformed with a Venetian braise into a hearty, cold weather sauce for pasta. The bird’s golden fat can be rendered and preserved for roasting potatoes or making confit, while the remainder of the carcass should be simmered into stock for soup.

Daniels’ duck breast — brined and then dried on a rack for several days — showcased two key techniques: the virtue of infusing flavor into duck’s densely rich and gamy meat; and the power of dry-aging to intensify flavors and naturally tenderize the meat. The breast had formed a seemingly hard orange surface in the refrigerated air, but it crisped better on the grill and was remarkably both juicy and tender.

One other key: the sweet-and-sour agrodolce sauce, a woodsy blend of vermouth and maple syrup, was a reminder that duck always benefits from boldly flavored counterparts that compliment and cut through its richness. The classic French dish, duck à l’orange, that I made for New Year’s Eve according to a recipe from Bibou’s Pierre Calmels, follows the same profile. The tang of citrus in the braise balanced with a kiss of honey that glazes the bird for its finishing crisp and perfumed our kitchen like an orange grove in blossom.

Though we did not have the time to let this duck age, Calmels noted that cooking the breast still on its rib cage helps the meat remain tender — and he was right. By dividing his preparation into two parts, braising the legs separately for an hour, while simply roasting the breast, also compensated for the fact that different parts of the duck cook best at different paces, with the legs requiring extra time.

Spice and smoke also make a perfect match. Both are at play in the smoked duck gumbo from Randy Rucker at River Twice, where the Houston native cooked me some of the best gumbo I’ve had since leaving Louisiana. The rustic, chocolate-brown roux is enriched with duck fat and scented with a smokehouse whiff of andouille. Rucker’s gumbo is, in fact, more a personal history than an actual recipe, an ever-changing bowl with the seasons and available ingredients. But it’s also indelibly rooted in its significance as the first dish he ever cooked together with his mother, Bootsie Pena. He finally wrote it down for me for the first time.

Similarly, duck brings back all kinds of childhood memories of Southern Thailand for Kalaya’s owner and chef, Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon, who serves a roasted duck with a turmeric-forward coconut curry at her BYOB on South Ninth Street. In fact, her native region prizes ducks for their eggs, the birds’ coastal diet of shellfish lending the yolks, which get salt-cured for desserts, a distinctive flavor and color that is “bright like the sunset.”

“I tried to do it here, but I totally failed,” she says, noting that American duck eggs’ diets are different.

But Suntaranon loves the ducks that Earl Keiser raises at his Keiser’s Pheasantry in York County so much, and was concerned when so many of his restaurant customers went dark early in the pandemic, that she put a duck curry on her menu. It’s inspired by one her aunt used to sell at their village market in Trang Province.

The key, again, is infusing it with powerful flavors, in this case an intricate blend of a dozen spices called Poo Moo Yaang (which she sells at Kalaya Market) that gets mixed with brown sugar and salt and massaged into the duck with fish sauce and soy and then wrapped in layers of plastic wrap for an overnight marinade. Cinnamon, turmeric, star anise, cumin, and cardamom figure prominently in the blend, which she said descends from both Arabic and Cantonese influences.

My family lobbied for a sweet-and-sour tamarind finishing glaze that’s been a standard option at Thai restaurants across Philly for decades. Kalaya’s duck glaze is coconut curry-based, but Suntaranon graciously offered a tamarind option, too, as well as a neat pointer to use the end of a crushed lemongrass branch to mop on the finishing glaze.

As my duck memories go, few Philadelphia restaurant dishes linger more in my imagination than the Portuguese duck rice — arroz de pato — that was a signature of Koo Zee Doo, a much-missed BYOB that closed in 2013.

Chef David Gilberg, now at Bridget Foy’s with wife and co-chef Carla Gonçalves, says it was the first dish Carla’s Portuguese mother, Dalila Gonçalves, ever cooked for him when they were just out of Haverford and still not yet engaged. Eight years later, it would be one of the centerpieces of the married couple’s new restaurant, the usually homey, one-pot dish elaborated into a multi-step restaurant-style production. Butcher the duck. Confit the legs with a Portuguese flair of cinnamon and bay. Make a stock to boil the rice and mix with the pulled meat, chouriço, and caramelized onion refogado, then bake it together until the rice browns to a crisp. Top with a juicy pink fan of breast roasted to order, and, well, after that production... my family happily ate duck rice for days.

The bonus: I was finally able to use a baking dish topped with a duck-shaped lid that I just had to have on our wedding registry. It only took 23 years for my duck game to get up to speed. But it was worth the wait.