⏰ Service 16 — Duck Confit
← Block 23–24: Poultry Overview
Skill: Confit is patience-based cooking. Duck legs cured overnight in salt and aromatics, then slow-cooked in their own fat (or olive oil, which works fine) for 2–3 hours at 200°F. The result is impossibly tender, deeply flavorful meat that also crisp-skins beautifully when you finish it in a hot pan.
- Read: Serious Eats — Classic Duck Confit
- Start the cure the evening before the Service. the Service is a long, low project cook. This is the kind of thing you can only learn by doing it.
The the project menu: 1. Duck confit legs — crisped in a cast iron at high heat after the slow cook 2. Serious Eats — French Bistro Salad — frisée or endive, lardons, mustard vinaigrette, a poached egg if you feel like it 3. Lentils or white beans cooked simply in the duck fat from the confit — this is called using the whole animal
What you're proving to yourself: that patience and low heat create textures that no other method can.
🎥 Compare Notes: Sunday Roasted Chicken, the Efficient Way (Ethan Chlebowski) — Before your confit, watch Ethan's reasoning about what heat does to poultry at each temperature — it gives direct context for why low-and-slow fat immersion produces such a different result.
You've now cooked poultry four different ways in one week: high-heat whole roast, spatchcock, red-wine braise, pan sear, and duck confit. Write one paragraph: of everything in the first 13 blocks, what technique do you now feel like you actually own? What still feels like you're following instructions rather than cooking?
← Block 21–22: Pork | Block 25–26: French Classics →