A Guide To Homemade Peking Duck

Today we graduate. We're leveling up. Forget about the prime rib and roast turkey because we're making Peking duck. I know it sounds intimidating. That's what I thought at first. But with a few important steps, I'd say it's actually quite difficult to mess this up. So we need a duck. You don't want something too big. This is about three and a half pounds. Give it a quick rinse. Pluck its feathers. Do what you gotta do. Then set it aside while we make our seasoning paste. That's gonna be two teaspoons of five spice powder, two teaspoons garlic powder, one teaspoon of onion powder, one teaspoon white pepper, one and a half tablespoons of sugar, one tablespoon salt, and three tablespoons of hoisin sauce. Mix well and aggressively lather it all along the insides of your duck. Using a wooden or metal skewer, sew up the duck, and now we gotta move on to our first extremely important step. You're gonna need a bike pump, which I feel like most people have, and if you don't, just go buy one. You'll need it eventually. For the lazy people out there, I've tried omitting this step and even using alternatives like blowing with a straw. Yeah, it doesn't work. The purpose for the pump is to separate the skin from the meat, which will allow the skin to dry much better, and that actually ends up creating that signature crispy skin. So don't skip it. Insert the pump valve under the skin at the neck, then press down with a paper towel to make sure there is no leaking. Continue pumping until your duck pretty much looks like a balloon, and you might need some help because air will leak out from other areas too. Just make sure to apply pressure until you visually see the skin separating from the meat. Into a saucepan, add 2.5 cups of water, 70 grams of Chinese red vinegar, and 100 grams of maltose. The maltose is important to create a sticky outer coating on the duck, and if you never work with it, just know it is insanely annoying, as you can tell. Anyways, you wanna heat this up over a stove until fully dissolved, then set aside. Grab a double meat hook, which looks like this, and poke it right through each armpit or wingpit, and what this does is allow us to hold it easier. Pour over a full kettle of boiling hot water to tighten back up the skin, then pour over our maltose red vinegar mixture all over the skin as well. The hard part is basically done, and now we can just hang our duck in the fridge for 24-48 hours so that the skin dries up. This is another really important step to making sure our skin crisps up in the oven. Oh yeah, and I also cut off the feet and head to save some space, here's what it looks like. After 36 hours in the fridge, the skin is super dry, and you can see the color has changed as well. For our roasting setup, I like to place the duck on the top of a middle rack, and then place a drip pan at the bottom of the oven. This ensures maximum airflow from both sides, and we're gonna start at 375F, then after 5 minutes, drop it down to 325F, rotate the bird after 30 minutes, and let it cook another 30 minutes. That's 1 hour of total cook time. At this point, our duck should be beautifully golden and crisp, so just hang it up to rest for about 15 minutes. And if done correctly, it should sound like this. Cutting and presentation is honestly really easy, just cut at an angle starting from the breast, making sure you're getting skin with meat. Then work your way down and around the rest of the duck. So how I like to plate it is, you got some pieces of both skin and meat here, and then right here is just skin, and then just meat. Some cucumbers, carrots, and scallions. That is a perfect plate. Alright, so now how do we eat this thing? I got these wrappers, you can make them yourself if you can, but I'm way too lazy for that. I just throw this into the microwave for 30 seconds, and you got some really thin wrappers for Peking duck. Hoisin sauce on the bottom, couple pieces of our duck, cucumber, and green onion. You can also add carrots, but I don't like them. Then we just wrap it up, a perfect bite. Skin is really crispy, the meat is still tender and really flavorful, you honestly can't tell the difference between this and what you get at the restaurants, I'm not gonna lie. So next time you're thinking about dropping $100 on Peking duck, just don't. Save a little bit of money, and impress your grandma, that's what I did.