How to Sear a Duck Breast (and Render the Fat)

Not familiar with cooking duck?  That's fine, not many home cooks I know are.

There are a couple of things to know about duck if you haven't worked with it before: 

1.  Look for it in the freezer section of your grocery store.  They probably have frozen duck breasts, or even whole birds.

2.  Duck meat is red, not white!  This is because unlike chickens and turkeys, who rarely get airborne, ducks have the ability to fly very long distances without stopping.  This requires the red, slow twitch muscle fibers that help animals carry out prolonged actions, as opposed to the white, fast twitch muscle fibers (seen in chicken breasts and wings) needed for sudden and brief activity.

3.  Duck skin has a ton of fat in it, and needs to be treated a certain way in order to be edible.  In this demo, we're going to sear it.  We also want to collect that fat that will come out of the skin for culinary uses.  Not only is duck fat a versatile and delicious ingredient in food (see Duck Fat Tortillas), if you don't want to cook with it, the drippings do an excellent job seasoning cast iron pots and pans.

Now, why searing?  Well, it's fast, but primarily, searing is done to create a crispy and appetizing crust.  Despite what you might hear on some cooking shows, it does not seal in the juices.  In fact, searing a steak or duck breast will allow more of the moisture to escape than other more gentle heating processes, such as poaching, confit, or even not too gentle roasting.

What searing does do, however, is create the Maillard reaction (also known as browning).  This sequence of events happens when a carbohydrate and amino acid molecule interact at high temperatures to create browning as well as a plethora of new flavors on the meat's surface.  This is why professional chefs are obsessed with getting a good sear, it creates excellent flavor. In this case, the highly browned crust of a properly cooked breast acts like a crispy duck potato chip-- and yes, that is a good thing. 

Now, fear this fowl no more, and start eating it instead.

Ingredients: 

Duck Breast

Tiny bit of olive (or other vegetable) oil

Sources:

McGee, Harold.  On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.