Duck Confit or Confit de Canard

Hey, I'm getting all French and Fancy down here on the farm.  A friend of ours is an avid hunter and he gave us some fresh duck meat the other day.  I've only cooked duck a handful of times in my life and that was whole, commercially grown duck.  So...not much experience here.  That's where Pinterest comes in handy.  I searched "duck recipes" and came up with a whole bunch of ways to cook it.  By far, the easiest sounding was duck confit.  I had to look up what it was and how to pronounce it.  First of all, the French pronounciation was "cohn fee" with the accent on the cohn and your best nasal Pepe-le-Pew (and, instead of "duck", it's Canard).  If you aren't French, say "con fee" with the accent on the fee.  If you're a hick, say "con feet".

Basically, confit is a meat slow cooked in it's own fat...lots and lots of fat.  So, really, it's southern cooking at it's finest.  It is also a meat preservation method and supposedly can be kept in the fridge for up to six months.  Yeah, I'm not gonna do that.

Here's a not-boring bit of info about duck confit.  But, I followed this recipe because it was the one I found on Pinterest and super easy.  Since the meat has to be cooked in it's own kind of fat, and ducks generally are not tubs of lard, I had to go in search of duck fat.  It was not the easiest of things to find, but I did find it at Fresh in Tyler, Texas.  Fresh is Brookshire's version of Whole Foods for small towns.  And...it ain't cheap.  That's another reason to use the recipe I decided upon.  Half of the fat was made up of avocado oil, which I buy from Costco and usually have on hand.  Also, almost all of the duck confit recipes I found called for using duck legs.  The duck meat I received had been cut up, put in a zip lock back and frozen, so I didn't know what pieces I had.  After I thawed it, I found that it was all breast meat.  But, I figured I didn't have anything to lose by using breasts instead of legs, so I went for it (and it turned out to be just fine).

Here are the ingredients.  

The recipe called for three pounds of duck legs.  I had four pounds of duck breasts, so I tweaked the seasonings a bit.  I'm pretty sure the amounts don't have to be exact.  Here's what I used:

14 ounces duck fat

2 cups avocado oil

1/3 cup smoked salt

1 tsp. dried thyme (use fresh if you have it)

4 bay leaves, crumbled

Oops, I forgot to put peppercorns in the picture.  Anyway...

1 Tbs. peppercorns, cracked

After this, I followed the recipe I linked to.

I cooked it on low for about eight hours, then took it out of the fat and shredded the meat.  It was fall-apart-tender.

Then I packed what I wasn't going to use for dinner last night into pint jars and then filled them with the oil/fat mixture.  Four pounds of duck meat made four pints of meat and one extra pint of fat/oil, which, I am told, I can use for other things.

The meat was quite salty (next time, I'm going to rinse it better before cooking), but very tasty.  I served it over mashed potatoes, which I didn't season at all because the duck was so flavorful.   Our asparagus is already making pretty good, so I steamed some of that and drizzled the oil over everything.  The oil seasoned everything just right.

After a night in the refrigerator, this is what the meat and fat looked like.  I'm getting at least four meals, maybe more, out of that one recipe, so it was definitely worth making.  And, it was a hit with Husband.