The duck starts here
A ragù with porcini, faux duck legs confit, and now I'm coveting a whole bird 🤦♀️
Happy winter, festive cook!
Lately, I’ve been craving duck. Perhaps it started because the Whole Foods where I usually shop stopped carrying duck legs and breasts (how could they???!!!), and so when I find them, I pounce. I was at a photo shoot a few weeks ago for one of my clients, and the photographer, out of the blue, started talking to me about duck ragù — she told me she was planning to make one for the holidays.
I texted her two recipes from Cooks Without Borders — one was a duck and porcini ragù I developed and published some years ago, and the other was a Pici all’Anatra (pici with duck ragù) from the Via Carota cookbook. And since then, I can’t get duck ragù out of my mind.
I love the Via Carota recipe, particularly the pici — hand-rolled pasta that’s like fat, uneven spaghetti, perfect for holding that ragù. But the Via Carota ragù is incredible rich. It starts with half a cup of duck fat or olive oil, and the fat that renders from duck legs never gets skimmed. My recipe is much less rich; all that fat gets removed. When I developed it, I’m not sure I realized that a ragù of duck and porcini is traditional in Italy’s Veneto region, but I have to say, the thing I dreamed up was pretty legit.
One day, voilà — duck legs appeared in Whole Foods. I scooped ‘em up, along with a quartet of duck breasts (for a rainy day — into the freezer went the breasts). (TMI note: I was finding duck legs at another store, Central Market for the Texans among you, but their legs — from Bell & Evans — are huge and rather expensive.)
Anyway, I finally made the ragù with the porcini this afternoon-into-evening. I wanted to see if my original recipe wanted tweaking, and yes, I really, really wanted to eat it. It did need a couple of minor tweaks: I changed a can of chopped tomatoes to crushed tomatoes (or passata), and added a step of reconstituting the dried porcini in boiling water, both of which go into the sauce. (The old version had us dropping dried porcini directly into the sauce.)
While the ragù was simmering (for nearly two hours), I made fresh egg pappardelle. I’d thought about making pici, but that would have cut into my workday too much.
I was glad I went the pappardelle route: It was luscious. So luxurious with that ragù. (Next time pici!) Here’s the recipe:
