It was the dry-aged duck at The Naramata Inn (RIP) that inspired me to start dry-aging at Ernest’s.
When properly scored, seared, rendered, and cooked, fresh duck breast is good. But the dry-aged duck at the Inn was excellent: the skin brittle and crisp, and the meat brawny and tender, in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The Inn was buying dry-aged crowns from Yarrow Meadows,[1] but one of the chefs, Macia, gave me some tips on doing it myself.
Crowns are duck carcasses that have had the wing tips, wingettes, legs, and the lower portion of the spine removed. At Ernest’s, we purchased whole ducks from King Cole. Once processed, we hung the crowns on rails in a dedicated reach-in cooler. The cooler had been fitted with racks for bake sheets, and we set some rails from our CookShack smoker across them. We acquired sharp s-hooks from the meat-cutting department, and pierced the crowns from the back so that we didn’t cut into the breast meat. The strongest, most secure place for the hook was through the back of the rib cage, right under the should blade.
Four to five days of hang-time was ideal, though even one day of hanging made a big difference in how the skin crisped. After five days a funky aroma usually developed. Interestingly, even though it was an intense smell, it completely dissipated once the meat was cooked.
After hanging, the breasts are removed from the crowns, and the remaining carcass can be roasted and used for stock.
The raw skin on the dry-aged breast is very dry, and slightly leathery. We found it difficult to score the skin in the traditional cross-hatch pattern. Even with a sharp knife, as soon as the blade caught on the skin it plunged into the meat. Our lab tech Anthony had the bright idea to use a sausage pricker, held at a very shallow angle, to puncture the skin thoroughly without damaging the flesh.
The final result was pretty stunning. Certainly the flavour of the meat was more concentrated, but it was the textures that really shone: the meat noticeably more tender, the skin super-crisp, and the fat fully rendered… no hint of the flabiness present in some fresh duck breasts. Most nights at least one guest would remark that it was the best duck they’ve ever eaten.
The principal menu-planning challenge with dry-aging ducks in-house is finding a balanced outlet for the legs and bones. We put a duck rillette en terrine on the menu as an appetizer. It sold well, but wasn’t enough to use all the legs, so we occasionally offered confit legs for large banquets. We had a reduction sauce on the duck breast plate, but produced so much stock from the bones that we also offered “Duck French Onion Soup” as a special.
Also, our logistics were much simpler than a regular restaurant. We were only open four days a week, and only did one full turn a night, about 70 covers. Each day we would sell maybe 10 servings of duck, meaning only 5 birds would be processed a day, and at any given time there were about 15 birds hanging. These fit comfortably in the single reach-in cooler, and were easy to rotate. A busier restaurant, open six days a week, would need a huge chunk of real estate to store these birds, and of course would need to devote a lot of labour to processing the whole birds. As an operator I would much, much rather buy a product like the Yarrow Meadows dry-aged crowns. Alas, there is no such product available to us in Edmonton. This is a good example of the kind of products that larger markets like Vancouver have access to that we do not.
Notes
- Yarrow Meadows is the premium product line produced by Fraser Valley Specialty Poultry.