Product Description

Few ingredients are as intimidating to the home cook as duck. But with the guidance of award-winning author James Peterson, any home chef can learn to prepare this incredibly versatile, flavorful bird.

The Duck Cookbook is the only complete guide to duck. With his signature style, Peterson explains the different varieties available and the best cooking methods for each part of the duck. Chapters begin with lessons on a single cooking technique-from sautéing to smoking-then move on to specific dishes such as soups, salads, and confit.

Peterson's detailed instructions ensure that readers will have the proper skills to handle any kind of duck preparation. The book's 65 recipes range from straightforward, delicious whole roasted duck and sautéed duck breasts (with a variety of sauces) to sophisticated terrines and mousses. Braised Duck Legs with Red Cabbage and Juniper Berries and Duck Confit Spring Rolls are among the many tempting highlights. Sidebars feature detailed instructions for cutting up a whole duck, making duck stocks, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #641091 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As a veteran cookbook author and culinary school instructor, Peterson (Glorious French Foods and Essentials of Cooking) brings to the table this lavish cookbook dedicated to the consumption of waterfowl. Beautifully illustrated with close-up photographs of each dish, the volume covers the all the possible methods for cooking duck: sauteing, braising, roasting, confit, smoking and curing. First, however, Peterson begins by explaining the varieties of duck (as well as how to cut it up) in the simple, elegant prose style for which he is known. While he incorporates many types of cuisine into his recipes, his influence is largely French. He offers a traditional Duck a l'Orange, for example, made with kumquats and Grand Marnier, as well as a traditional Cassoulet with Duck Confit. He also includes dishes such as Pappardelle with Duck Sauce, Duck Sausages, and Duck Prosciutto with Figs. He surprises with recipes that balance the duck's heaviness, such as Duck Confit Spring Rolls and Duck Legs with Thai Green Curry. This is a perfect book for fall cooking.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
James Peterson has written seven award-winning cookbooks, including Simply Salmon (STC). He taught cooking for 17 years-at the French Culinary Institute and Peter Kump's Cooking School in New York-and is now a frequent guest teacher at schools around the country. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Ducks, Ducks, Ducks, Ducks, Ducks
The title tells it all. This book is all about cooking duck using most techniques common to other types of meats plus at least one which is unique to duck and other fatty fowl. The nine techniques / preparations chapters are:

Sauteing
Braising
Roasting
Confit - a French cooking and preservation method unique, I believe, to ducks and geese
Smoking
Curing
Soups
Salads
Terrines and Mousses

It's interesting that while poaching is a common cooking technique for chicken, the technique is not included here for duck. This technique is largely replaced by the confit method. This is just one clue to the fact that a duck is different from a chicken and methods which work for one will not work for the other. The biggest difference is the level of fat in a duck's skin (but not in it's meat). This is simply due to the fact that ducks can fly and chickens cannot and ducks spend a lot of time in the water. This also explains why almost all duck meat is dark, more similar to a chicken's legs than to it's breast meat.

The difference between ducks and chickens is the main thing which makes this book valuable in itself, especially since many of the techniques appear to be unique to duck cookery. A second great value to the book is that it spells out the right way to cook to avoid fatty flesh if your primary interest is to avoid the saturated fat without loosing out on the great taste of duck.

Aside from the confit method, one of the best values derived from duck is the high quality of the broth one can make from duck, in many ways as valuable and as flavorful as stocks derived from veal. The only drawback is that to make a decent amount of duck broth, you need 12 carcasses or equivalent amount of leftover pieces.

This book is by far the most complete collection of duck recipes I could find. The next closest sources are the Cooks Illustrated book entitled 'Chicken', with about 28 pages of duck recipes and 'Beard on Birds' by James Beard which has 19 pages devoted to duck, including many of the recipes included in Peterson's book. In fact, it is a sign of the times that Beard's book, published in 1979 (and probably date back at least 20 to30 years before that time) have several recipes on wild duck while Peterson deals exclusively with the two most common domesticated duck sources, the Long Island (or Pekin) duck and the Mullard duck, the most common source of cryovac packed duck breast.

Comparing Peterson to Beard, one finds that while Beard has good recipes, equal to his reputation in American culinary education, Peterson has superior recipes and excellently detailed techniques and explanations for the duck specific methods. Worthy of his book on culinary techniques, the photographic instructions on cutting raw duck and carving roasted birds are impeccable.

Peterson's work has placed him high in the ranks of American cookbook authors and this book is a worthy addition to his canon. In past books, I have occasionally found a bit of less than perfect sequencing of steps, so that one must be very careful to read his recipes through and think them through before beginning, but I find none of that clumsiness here. His impeccible descriptions of a sometimes demanding technique are invaluable.

If I collected cookbooks for no other reason than to be an easy source of recipes, this is the type of book I would most quickly buy. Adding to the values is the selection of excellent oversize paged photographs of completed dishes joining the great color photos illustrating the techniques.

Duck has an aura of luxury about it for a very reasonable price (as long as you leave off the foie gras). This book can be a great access to a new culinary direction. Recommended. Just be sure when selecting recipes that the type of duck matches the recipe. Recipes for fatty ducks may give poor results with leaner birds.

The fastest way to master cooking duck
I was intrigued with the idea of cooking duck breast, and after I tried and failed, I figured I could benefit from learning as much as possible about the different ways to cook duck. Since I knew how to cook a whole duck, I figured it would not be difficult to cook just the breast, but failed miserably. Consequently, I set out to look for a cookbook that would show me all the secrets of cooking duck.

This book not only did that, but it helped me understand what I did wrong. The recipe I used before purchasing the book was from Spain. Over there, is more common to buy a duck which is smaller than the one you get in the U.S., so I should have cooked at a higher temperature and a bit longer.

I recommend it to those who have never cooked duck before, as well as to those that are interested in gastronomic adventures beyond typical duck recipes.