This recipe takes about 5 minutes of actual effort, plus 3 hours 10 minutes baking time, and is always amazing. It’s hard to believe a recipe this simple could be so good, but ducks are delicious by themselves, so the best thing is to do as little to it as possible and just enjoy the flavor. If you have the instinct to add herbs, spices etc., fight it! You want to taste the duck!
- Acquire a duck. This will be the only even vaguely difficult step.
- Preheat the oven to 500 Fahrenheit.
- Stab the duck a couple times in each breast, to pierce the skin and let the oil out.
- At this point you may optionally squirt lemon or orange juice on the outside of the duck.
- Sprinkle salt & pepper generously all over the interior cavity of the duck, and all over the outside of the duck.
- You may also optionally sprinkle dried onion bits, or dried garlic bits, generously over the inside and outside of the duck. These will become delicious crunchy bits. If you use onion it will always be perfect; if you use garlic it’s possible to use too much and overwhelm the flavor of the duck, so exercise some restraint with the garlic.
- Put the duck breast up in a baking pan deep enough to hold a large amount of drippings. If you have a baking rack, great! Put the duck on the rack. If you don’t, no worries! The duck will be wonderful anyway.
- Bake the duck uncovered in the 500 degree oven for 10 minutes.
- Reduce the heat to 325 Fahrenheit, then bake the duck (still uncovered) another 3 hours. Done!
The duck will come out a perfect, beautiful caramel brown, studded with crunchy specks. I recommend serving it with bread or toast which you can dip in the drippings. Be sure to eat the skin, since it tastes wonderful. Drippings can also be saved for later to cook veggies in, and extra skin can be cut into tiny bits and mixed with veggies as you roast or pan fry them.
