Duck Legs ‘Confit’ (Faux Confit de Canard)

Recipe by: Leslie Brenner

Here’s a stunningly simple way to make something that looks and tastes remarkably like confit de canard (duck leg preserved in duck fat). It takes only a couple of hours, rather than a couple of days, and involves only about 5 minutes of attention. Unlike traditional confit, it does not require any added duck fat; in fact, it only has two ingredients: duck legs and salt. Not only is it delicious, but it also pays a fabulous dividend: duck fat that gets rendered in the process and can be used later.

My recipe is based on a method described in a recipe by

Hank Shaw

more than a decade ago on Simply Recipes. I don’t know whether Shaw developed it himself, or learned it from someone else. I contacted him to find out, he referred me to Simply Recipes, and they answered me five months later, unable to help. (Maybe Hank — who’s here on Substack — will eventually shed some light!)

In any case, I built on Shaw’s ba…