Recipe 7: Duck & Orange Salad

As soon as I saw this salad’s name, I was ready to feel fancy for less. Duck á l’Orange is a dish I grew up seeing all over the place (any Even Stevens fans in the house?) but never actually ate because it usually requires an entire roasted duck.

I already know I love to eat duck in various forms (confit, Peking, etc.), I had high hopes for this guy.

The Shopping Experience

To grab our star of the dish, the duck breasts, I was fairly confident my local slightly fancier grocer (Urban Fare) would have a fresh cut. Unfortunately, despite having tons and tons of raw pre-marinated beef and chicken options, they didn’t have any duck. Instead, I just got a couple frozen ones and thawed them in my fridge the night before cooking.

Watercress seems to be one of the more elusive ingredients as nowhere seemed to have any. I had a strong childhood memory of my dad cooking with it on occasion so it surprised me that it was so hard to find. In the end, I searched for leafy greens with similar flavour profiles and grabbed a bunch of kale for a similar nutty, lush flavour.

This recipe seemed riddled with disappointments while I was shopping because my search for blood oranges also resulted in no success. Luckily, the recipe does state that you can use a regular orange so I settled once more.

The Cooking Experience

I never knew just how fatty duck breasts were before cooking them! After scoring the fat, the duck breasts splattered all over the stove while they were cooking. This made lifting the lid of the pan a dangerous effort. My duck breasts also looked undercooked after cooking to the recommended time in the book so they had to sit in the pan for almost double the time. I’m thinking this is because my duck breasts were thicker?

Other than the stress of being not sure how well my duck was cooking and the fear of getting oil splatter burns on my wrists, the cooking process was nice and easy.

The Eating Experience

While I was cooking, I was apprehensive about toasting the baguette slices in the duck fat since absorbent bread and fat didn’t exactly scream “healthy” but while I was eating, I think it was the highlight of the dish! It was so flavourful and made the bread crispy without being hard.

I personally didn’t think the orange added anything special; in fact, it even felt a little out of place. I’m thinking it could be because my orange was a regular sweet orange. Perhaps a more tart blood orange would have made all the difference.

The kale substitution was a great success! My boyfriend who doesn’t usually like kale (to the point where he makes a face any time I used to talk about cooking with it) really liked it with the smokiness and juiciness of the duck.

This recipe was very filling thanks to the cut of duck and toasted bread. However, this very combination of ingredients also proved to be a bit problematic! Some slices of my duck were chewier than others (again, possibly because of the thickness) so trying to take a bite of both ingredients together were difficult as the bread would break off easily while the duck had to be a bit more forced.

But, if you’re one who is able to pop an entire slice of baguette into your mouth at once, you’ll probably be fine with a chewier duck!

Final Thoughts

Alas, because the orange didn’t quite do anything for me and the chewiness of the duck didn’t make the recipe that fun to eat, I will say that I would rather try other duck recipes I find elsewhere before reattempting this one. Maybe I’ll try it again with thinner pieces of duck or cutting them into smaller pieces, and a blood orange next time. Only time will tell!

Total estimated cook time: 24 minutes (how oddly specific...)

Total actual cook time: 50 minutes