Monday 30 January 2012

Recipe - Pork Mince Chili Soup


This is a soup that I recommend on a cold winter night, it is sure to heat you up and give you a warm and cosy feeling.

At times I start doing things in a new way in the kitchen. One of these things is that I've changed the order of how I apply my spices in stews, soups and curries. I used to fry the meat and veg and then add in the spices. These days I do it a bit differently, I start by heating the pan and then adding in the oil. Once the oil is warm as well I add in the spices and fry them off for a while, almost making a spice past. Only then do I add in the meat and veg. It might just be imagination but for me that gives me a deeper flavour to the dish. Why not give it a go in your kitchen next time?

This is, as quite often happens on this blog, a dish that you can freestyle quite a bit. Use beef mince, whatever vegetables you got at home, make it yours. This is just an indication as to how you can cook it, the way I did it. I did add quite a bit of different spices but use what you got in the quantities you think will suit you.

If you kick it up a bit you can always have some sourcream on the side for the spicily challenged. Either that or make a wimpy version and serve it with some chillies and hot sauce on the side. Whichever way you think you can get way with.

Time for the recipe? I'd say so.

Ingredients (serves 4)
Olive oil
Ground coriander
Ground cumin
Dried oregano
Smoked paprika
Chilli powder
500g pork mince
1 - 2 onions, sliced
1 - 2 celery sticks, chopped
1 red pepper, diced
2 - 3 garlic cloves, diced
3 tbsp tomato purée
1 can chopped tomatoes
450 ml chicken stock
Salt
Pepper
Fresh coriander

Method
Heat a large saucepan or cassserole pan on a medium heat on the stove. Once hot, pour in the olive oil and let it heat up too. Add the spices and stir well and let this cook for a while, forming a paste. Keep stirring and don't let it burn.

Add in the pork mince and fry this until no longer pink. Now it is time to add in the onion, celery, pepper and garlic. Let this cook together for five minutes or so, stirring now and then.

Add in the tomato purée, chopped tomatoes and the stock. Give it all a good stir and let it come to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and let it simmer under a lid for about 30 to 40 minutes or until the vegetables have softened to your liking.

Ladle into soup bowls, garnish with coriander leafs.

Enjoy!

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Recipe - Halloumi Salad


This is not something you see every day on this blog - a vegetarian recipe. I have to admit that it did taste really nice, even if I say so myself. It was good enough for me to have it as dinner one day and then I had the leftovers for lunch the next day. Then swiftly I had lots of meat for dinner on the second day, just to even things out again.

Just to try and trick myself into thinking that I was eating meat I kept referring to the halloumi as moomin meat. One of my twitter friends, Johanna, soon informed me that cottage cheese is known as moomin mince. I'm not sure if the shops label it as that yet though.

Although vegetarian I'd say that this recipe is pretty much in the freestyling way I recommend. Use whatever stuff you got at home that you think could work together. Pickled beetroot could for example work really well with this.

I made a simple vinaigrette with some olive oil and Cabernet Sauvignon vinegar but you can leave that out or use any dressing you think would work with it.

Well, let's not spend too much time mulling over the fact that I assembled a vegetarian dish, let's have a look at the recipe.

Ingredients (serves 4)
Olive oil
Flour
Smoked Paprika
Halloumi (about 225g - 250g)
Black Beluga Lentils
Plum tomatoes, quartered
Red onion, thinly sliced
Edamame beans
Rocket leafs

Method
Mix the flour and smoked paprika on a plate. Take the halloumi cheese out of its packaging and pat it dry with some kitchen towel. Press the halloumi onto the flour and paprika mix, making sure to coat all sides.

Heat a frying pan on a medium heat. Pour in some olive oil and let that heat up. Add in the halloumi and fry on all sides until it colours up nicely. Remove from the heat and dice up the halloumi.

Assemble all components on plates in a nice and orderly fashion.

Enjoy!


Monday 23 January 2012

Recipe - Half Special / Recept - Halv Special


I'm sure the image above makes a lot of you go 'what the...'. Fear not, it shall all be revealed.

Here in the UK there's the burger van or chippie. In Sweden there's something called gatukök or street kitchen. They are fast food outlets that can be found in almost any city, town or village. Some are still independents and other are parts of chains like Sibylla.

From these you can buy hamburger dishes, sausage dishes, ice creams, magazines, pick-n-mix and much much more. Some are even doing pizzas, kebabs and other dishes that are more or less considered imports.

There are some dishes that most Swedes I know consider as classics. This being one of the most classic of them all. Basically a 'half special' means that you get a hotdog in a bun with mash on top. A 'whole special' would be two hotdogs.

It's up to you if you want grilled or simmered hotdogs. Personally I go for simmered if they're of the slim variety and grilled for the thicker ones. But that's just me.

You can also add toppings like a gherkin and mayo 'salad', diced gherkins or the daddy of them all - the West Coast Salad. As you can see from the photo there's just crispy onions on top of this one. I was going to do a gherkin mayo salad but I found that the gherkin monster had been visiting and had eaten all my gherkins.

There's another version of this where instead of the sausage being served in a bun you get it all rolled up in what is called 'thin bread' in Sweden. That is basically our version of the tortilla. I might be wrong here but I think it originates from up north and was made by the Sami people. For an idea of how a 'thin bread roll' looks - have a look here.

If you visit Sweden, make sure that you try our version of fast food from a gatukök. It might not be highbrow or very advanced but it is part of the culture and something different to savour.

Before I head over to the recipe I must admit that I cheated a bit and didn't make my own sausages. It is on the list though. The ones I used was of really high quality though and the flavour of them really brought memories back. It was an almost exact replica of what I had stored in my 'food flavour memory'. The ones I used were frankfurters from unearthed. And no, I'm not sponsored to say that. ;-) I just saw them in the shop and bought a pack, something I'm very happy about.

Let's head over to the recipe now, there's really not much to this.

Ingredients
Water
Bay leaf
Salt
Pepper corns
Good quality hotdogs/frankfurters
Hotdog buns
Mash (make it a bit firmer than you'd probably normally do)
Crispy onions (optional)
Mustard (optional)
Ketchup (optional)

Method
Pour water into a pan that it large enough to easily hold the sausages. Add the bay leaf, salt and pepper corns and bring it all to a boil. Turn off the heat, pop in the sausages and put the lid on.

While the sausages heat through you can make your mash. Make sure to season it well and make it quite firm.

To assemble, just pop a hotdog (or two if you're making a whole special) into a bun. Spread with mustard and ketchup if you so wish. On top of this we add the mash, I used a ice-cream scoop to try and make it look a bit prettier, and the other toppings of your choice.

Enjoy!

Friday 20 January 2012

Review - "Butchery to Pimp Your Home Cooking" course

This is a knife, M'kay?
A couple of weeks ago I saw a tweet mentioning a butchering course. This course was being advertised as being run by Nathan Mills, @naththebutcher.

Given the fact that I've wanted to learn better knife skills for quite some time as well as wanting to get a better understanding of how to cut up and treat my meats I quickly signed up.

The day for the course soon came around and I left Gods own county for London and all its lights and distractions. Having arrived at Bermondsey tube station I headed for Nathan's place. I have to be honest and say that finding the place in the dark wasn't the easiest thing. We did talk about this though and I believe some photographs will be added to their site in order to aid you in finding itt.

Once I found the place I was very warmly welcomed by Nathan and Ruth. I had a quick tour of the facilities that was very new, clean and impressive. They have the look around them that makes you expect Vinny Jones to come in with some poor sod of a gangster that is being 'disposed' of.

After some chat I was treated to some thinly sliced roast beef, bread and condiments as a quick snack as we were waiting for the other course delegates. This time there was only two other delegates, the maximum amount of delegates are five.

Once everyone was gathered and had tried some of the beef we were handed our coats, aprons, gloves, cloths and knives. It was getting serious.

We started with the chicken. First we were given instructions on how to truss the chicken and were all giving this a go. Chicken trussed, we cut off the twine in order to start butchering the bird. For each 'sub-part' of the bird Nathan gave us a talkthrough, then he demonstrated whilst talking us through it again. Then it was our turn to try it, with Nathan offering us assistance when needed. This methodology was used throughout the evening and at least for me it worked really well. Once we had the chicken breasts off the bird we were given ziploc bags. The breasts were put into the bags and apple juice were poured onto them together with sliced chilies and some herbs. Marinating, ready to be cooked.

Sawing the pig.
Next we went on to the shoulder of pork. First though, Nathan got half a pig out for us and showed us how they butcher down a pig. All the time giving us the names of the parts, tips about good cuts that are unknown and generally good tips and pointers about pork. Feeling suitably humble about my lack of skills with the knife it was now time to turn my attention to my shoulder of pork. We boned it, generally tidied it up and applied some herbs and spices in order to make porchetta out of it. If we didn't make it all the way, I do think we were close to the world record for the amount of garlic in three porchettas. This is when we got to the knots...

Leave no garlic behind.
Either Nathan got the patience of a saint or he got his knife out and made some serious damage to dead animals when we had left. He had to teach the three of us how to make the butchers knot. Without wasting too much time on the subject let's just say that we were probably not the quickest to learn or the most nimble of the finger. In the end thought we had managed to roll and tie up our porchettas and it was time to head over to the leg of lamb.

Making knots, or not.

Just like with the pig, Nathan got half a lamb out and proceeded to butcher it down as he was telling us what he was doing and why. That done, we proceeded to get our legs of lamb butterflied and smothered in a pesto-like marinade that Nathan prepared for us.

Busy at work.

Lamb put away and the place tidied we sat down for a very nice meal of slow cooked beef, sauce, bread, salad and some good wine. It seems like all of us fitted together quite well because the conversation flowed during the meal, just as it had all evening.

All the meat we prepared, including the chicken carcass, were packaged up as the evening progressed and as we left we were carrying some serious amounts of meat with us. We were joking about being being put through a 'stop and search' and trying to convince the police that we were not carrying around a butchered whore or two.

So, what's my conclusion of this course then and would I go for another course with Nathan again?

I thoroughly enjoyed the course and picked up lots during the evening. Nathan had a very easy way of teaching us and the entire evening was peppered with small tips and good advice. At times you did notice that we were the first class and there's room for some improvement but that is just to be expected. I went away feeling more confident in my abilities to work with a knife and that's what I came there for. The added bonus of a shedload of nice meat to cook and a nice evening in very good company was a most excellent bonus.

As for going again, hell yeah. I'm quite tempted to go for one of the courses where you get to butcher a pig or lamb but I think I'd need to get myself another freezer to fit all that meat in.

For more information on the courses, to book a course and all that - have a look at Edible Experiences here.

Edible Experiences
[Disclaimer 1: All photos are kindly supplied by Nathan and Ruth. I was so busy that I didn't have time to take any photos.]
[Disclaimer 2: Booking this course was my own decision, I paid the full price out of my own pocket and I have no affiliation with either Nathan or Edible Experiences. All views and opinions above are my own.]

Wednesday 18 January 2012

Recipe - Sailors Stew ; Recept - Sjömansgryta


Once again we're looking at a very classic Swedish recipe. This recipe has roots way back in time and was something simple that poor people cooked. The name indicates that it might have been cooked on ships in the past as well, something that would work well since it stews on its own.

My twitter friend Linda pointed out that this reminds quite a bit about scouse as well. I guess that most countries have versions of dishes like this.

If I were to literally translate the Swedish name of this dish we'd end up with 'seaman stew'. I choose not to use that name. ;-)

You can of course pimp it and add lots of extras but I kept it simple for once and that is the recipe you'll get below. One thing to think about is that the beer you choose (I used Spitfire Ale - thanks for the Christmas present Mark and Kate ;) ) have a impact on the 'gravy' in the end. The darker the beer, the darker the gravy turns out in the end.

I used feather cut steak but if you can't find that just use whatever steak you got. Make sure to whack it good with a meat mallet if it's too thick though. You don't want it to be more than 3 - 4 mm thick in this recipe.

The classic accompaniment to this is sliced pickled gherkins. Trust me, you want that on your plate with this.

Before we head over to the recipe, just a quick question to you readers - I've posted some what I consider classic Swedish recipes recently. Is this something you find interesting so I should continue or is there something else you'd prefer me to post about? Please use the comment form in this post to let me know what you think.

Now over to the recipe, this really isn't rocket surgery cooking.

Ingredients (serves 4)
300g or so worth of feather cut steak
800g or so worth of potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1 cm thick slices
1 tbsp butter
2 onions (or more to taste), sliced
A sprig or two of fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
300ml beer
Salt
Pepper

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 180c.

Heat up a casserole pan (with lid) on a medium heat on the stove and melt the butter. Once the butter is nice and ready, add in the onions and fry for about 10 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from the pan and add in the steaks instead.

Fry the steaks until sealed on both sides. Pop the onions back into the pan and add in the thyme, salt and pepper. Top with the potatoes and pour in the ale.

Lid on and into the oven for about an hour or until the potatoes are soft but not a total mush. Serve with the aforementioned sliced pickled gherkins.

Enjoy!

Monday 16 January 2012

Recipe - Braised Red Cabbage


We're not talking advanced cookery here but it is still a recipe that is worth having tucked away. Braised red cabbage goes well with quite a lot of dishes and people have been known to eat is cold as well as heated.

It is definitely something that you can freestyle quite a bit.This time we cooked it quite safe and boring, mostly due to the fact that we were serving it to people whose preferences we weren't sure about. Next time we might swing it a bit more. Add in some freshly squeezed orange juice and grated skin from the orange? Why not. Add some grated nutmeg and grated allspice, why not? We actually had some star anise in from the beginning which we removed once we thought it had added enough aniseedy flavour.

We had this on the side with a beef and blue cheese pie we served on New Years Eve but that's just one thing to have it with. I think you'll be able to think up some other combinations to go with.

Just a note though, if you cook it on the stove top - make sure to check it often and add liquid as and when needed. Alternatively, lid on and in the oven at 180c for about an hour and you shouldn't need to worry too much about it running dry.

Enough chit-chat, we got a recipe to look at.

Ingredients
2 red onions, sliced
1 red cabbage, about 1 kg, sliced
1 large Bramley apple, peeled and roughly diced
250 ml water (more needed later as you cook away)
60 ml red wine vinegar
3 tbsp brown sugar
Salt
Pepper


Method
Heat a large casserole pan on the hob. Once hot pour in some olive oil and fry off the onion until soft. Add in the other ingredients and stir well. Let this cook under a lid (or alternaively in the oven as per above) for about an hour or until soft to your liking, stirring now and then. Adjust the seasoning as you go along.


Enjoy!

Wednesday 11 January 2012

Recipe - Celeriac Remoulade


Since I try to be honest with my postings I'll admit it straight away. This recipe is stolen from Jeans excellent blog Delightful Repast, her version with a very nice picture can be found here.

In my view celeriac remoulade is just a slightly posher coleslaw but I find that it goes extremely nicely with smoked meats. One of our regular haunts, The Five Horseshoes, quite often have smoked dishes on the menu.Celeriac remoulade are more often than not part of those dishes.

The inspiration from those dishes is what led me to want to make some celeriac remoulade to go with the smoked duck breasts we were bringing for New Years Eve. Some google-fu later and I had found Jeans excellent recipe and Robert was married to your mothers sister.

The remoulade definitely benefits from staying in the fridge at least over night, the flavours generally gets deeper that way.

I guess this is such a simple recipe that there's really no need for me to waffle on any longer. Let's have a look at how this is made. Just a quick note - you can of course cut/slice the celeriac by hand if you don't have a food processor.

Ingredients (made enough for eight people not to miss out)
700g celeriac (celery root)
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp fresh lemon juice
6 tbsp mayonnaise
3 tsp minced pickled gherkin
2 tsp drained, rinsed and chopped capers
2 tsp Dijon mustard
Ground black pepper

Method
Clean up the celeriac root, trimming off all the nasty stuff. Cut the celeriac into smaller pieces that fits into the feeder tube of your food processor. Pop a shredder disk into your food processor and shred the celeriac.

Put the shredded celeriac into a non-reactive bowl and toss with the salt and two tablespoons of the lemon juice. Cover the bowl and let this sit for about an hour.

Mix together all the other ingredients and stir in with the shredded celeriac.

Enjoy!

Monday 9 January 2012

Recipe - Forgotten Cookies


I haven't researched it but I would hazard a guess that the name for these cookies come from the fact that you leave them in the oven and forget about them for quite some time.

I'm not much into sweet stuff but when I tasted some of these over Christmas I really liked them. What you seen on this picture is our attempt at making them.

Ours didn't turn out quite as nice as Mrs T's but I blame that on our oven. Make sure that the seal on your oven is intact so the heat doesn't go down too quickly. A long and slow cooking is what's needed to make these extra delicious.

I'm sure you could pop some other nice stuff in them but this is a good start at least. Basically they're just some meringues with walnut and chocolate so there's loads of room for freestyling. Some chopped up raspberries anyone?

There seems to be quite a lot of different recipes around for this but this is sort of what we freestyled together from a bunch of them.....

Ingredients (makes about 30)
2 large egg whites
120g golden caster sugar
120g roughly chopped walnuts
150g good quality dark chocolate, roughly chopped
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method
Pre-heat the oven to 180c.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff and dry. Whisk in the sugar a little at a time until you got a nice and glossy meringue. Fold in the walnuts and chocolate carefully, using a metal spoon.

Spoon teaspoon-sized mounds of the mixture onto baking sheets that have been covered with tin foil.

Pop the baking sheet into the oven, turn off the oven and let the cookies sit in there until the oven is cold.

Be careful when you remove the cookies from the tin foil.

Enjoy!

Thursday 5 January 2012

Two quick links...

I was greatly surprised, and felt quite proud, when I got an email from Kevin from The BBQ Smoker Site.


Apparently he had spotted my site and liked it enough to put it as a Blog Spotlight on his excellent site.

I have followed Kevins blog in my RSS reader for quite some time but this came as a complete surprise to me. A very pleasant surprise though.

So head over to have a look at Kevin's site - there's quite a lot of goodness there.

Secondly, hell has not frozen over totally - yet. However, this blog now has its own Facebook Page. This is just the blog, not me. I'm still being a bit of a luddite and refuse to get my own Facebook account but if you are of that persuasion, please like and follow the Freestyle Cookery Facebook Page.

Over and out for now...

Wednesday 4 January 2012

Recipe - Merguez Sausages


As regular readers will know I recently bought myself a sausage stuffer, something I wrote about here, and this was my first attempt of trying to use it.

I better give some background as well. Patience have never been one of my strong sides and I might not always have been the best at dealing with things not going exactly as I want, especially when it comes to new things that I think I should be able to master.

There was much joy in my family regaling the story about how as a four year old I was trying ice skating for the first time. Having seen ice hockey on telly many a time even at that tender age I was certain that I knew exactly how to skate.

Needless to say the ice and the skates conspired to show me differently. The tantrum that followed was of epic proportions. The ice skates were thrown across the ice with all the might of a royally pissed off four year old. My parents spent the next couple of weeks quizzing friends and family as to who might have taught me the very spicy language I used.

It took them another three years until I agreed to go near an ice rink again.

With that background, and many more examples that I should not share with you, I did approach this entire sausage stuffing adventure with quite a bit of apprehension. I was envisaging things going horribly wrong, sausage mix all over the kitchen and a very nice and shiny sausage stuffer being smashed into pieces.

No one was more surprised than I when it actually went quite well and I responded maturely to the small setbacks I encountered. The quality of the sausage stuffer I bought from Franco's Famous Sausage Making was probably part of this. A really good piece of kit, top quality. I can't praise it high enough, I'm glad I went for a decently sized machine, I think that will pay off in the end.

The worst bit was probably getting the casing onto the spout, but with some patience and deep breathing I managed to figure out some kind of knack and got it done.

I did have a couple of hiccups where the sausage mixture did some funny things but all that I did then was to cut off the casing and re-tie it in both ends and keep going.

The recipe I used comes from a most excellent Swedish book called Korv (Sausage) written by a bloke named Kristofer Franzén. It is a truly inspirational book and I really hope it would be translated to English because I believe it is worthy of a much bigger audience. It sure beats quite a lot of the English language books I've read on the subject matter.

You might be a bit surprised as to the very exact measurements in this recipe, it's not my normal cavalier freestyling approach. That approach doesn't really work on sausage making, but fear not - once I've managed to understand things a bit better I'll soon be coming up with my own weird and wonderful attempts at making sausages that taste exactly my way.

Well, there's been one quite embarrassing story from my childhood and some other waffling so I think it is high time to head over to the recipe.

One final thing first though, there will be some recipes in the near future where I use these sausages so if you don't know what to have them with - despair not.

Ingredients (makes 2kg mix, enough for about 35 sausages)
Meat
1200g lamb, not too lean - diced
800g beef chuck - diced

Spices
32g sea salt
36g olive oil
6g ground black pepper
3g ground fennel seeds
20g crushed garlic
24g harissa

Method
Make sure that the meat has the right temperature, preferably frozen on the surface. Alternatively freeze it completely and then let it defrost in the fridge over night.

Pour some luke warm water into a bowl and put about 8 meters worth of lamb casings into it to rehydrate and flush out the salt. Let this sit for two to three hours. Rinse through the casings a couple of times to make extra sure that the salt is gone.

Spread the salt on the meat and mince the meat using a medium sized mincer plate.

Mix the minced meat, oil and spices either by hand or in the bowl of a stand mixer on a low speed until it all binds together nicely. Try not to let the meat mixture to get warmer than 4c at any stage of these processes.

Transfer the meat mixture into the container of your sausage stuffer, or whatever apparatus you will be using to stuff the casings.

Thread the casings onto the sausage stuffer spout and feed the meat mixture until it is at the end of the spout and ready to start filling the casing.

Tie a knot at the end of the casing and start filling, making sure not to fill too hard. Finish by tying a knot in the other end too.

Make 15 - 20 cm long sausages by pinching with the thumb and index finger of one hand about one sausage length into the casing and then the same thing with the other hand another sausage length in. Twist the sausage you have between your hands forwards. Measure another sausage length and repeat. Repeat until all sausages have been 'created'.

It's good to let the sausages rest for a couple of hours, or over night in the fridge, before you cook them.

Cut links between the sausages and grill them or fry them in a frying pan with a little bit of olive oil until they start browning up.

Try not to overcook them since they don't contain much fat at all.

Enjoy!

Monday 2 January 2012

Recipe - Cold and Hot Smoked Duck Breast


We were invited over to a couple of friends for a New Years Eve celebration and we said that we'd bring some food with us.

This is what we brought for starter, cold and hot smoked duck breasts which we served with celeriac remoulade. You'll have to wait a bit for the celeriac recipe but you can have the duck recipe now.

This is a quite simple recipe but the end result is very rewarding. This time I cooked two duck breasts, which I thought would be enough for starters for us. If you cook more, just increase the brine proportions accordingly.

As for the brine, I added some brown sugar, black peppercorns and ground allspice to the recipe below. That's not necessary at all but if you feel like it, go for it. If not, just skip it. Even better - freestyle it with the flavourings you think will work.

Adjust the smoking times to suit you, the cold smoking can be in the region of two to three hours (mine was in for two hours and twenty minutes) and the hot smoking is normally fine with around an hours smoke. However, freestyle it to your hearts content as always.

I used alder wood for this, but guess what - if you prefer a different flavour go for it.

As I said in the beginning I served this with celeriac remoulade but I could just as well have gone with a red onion marmalade or chutney for example.

Enough chit-chat, let us have a look how to make this....

Ingredients (enough for 4 very generous starter portions)
Brine
1.5l water
400g salt

Two duck breasts, skin on

Method
Bring the water to a boil, remove from the heat and stir in the salt. Let this cool down before pouring into a non-reactive container.

Score the skin on the duck breasts in a crosshatch pattern, trying not to cut into the meat. Add the duck breasts to the brine, weighing down with a plate if needed to make sure they're fully submerged. Let this brine for 2 - 3 hours, depending on the size of the duck breasts.

Remove from the brine, rinse well and pat dry. Let them sit in the fridge, uncovered, over night to dry out properly.

The next day remove them from the fridge as you prepare your smoker for cold smoking.

Once the smoke is rolling, pop the duck breasts into the smoker and smoke for 2 - 3 hours according to taste.

When the time is up, remove the duck breasts from the smoker and prepare the smoker for hot smoking at 100c/210F instead.

Once the smoker have reached that temperature and the smoke is rolling again - add the duck breasts back into the smoker.

Smoke for an hour and then turn off the smoke generator. Staying at the 100c/210F temperature let the duck breasts cook until they reach an internal temperature of 71c/160F.

Once they've reached that temperature, remove them from the smoker and let them cool down a bit. When they're a bit cooler, heat up a frying pan on a medium temperature.

Pop in the duck breasts, skin side down, and let them render down the fat for about 2 to 3 minutes. If you cook the duck breasts in batches, make sure to remove the rendered fat between each batch.

Remove the duck breasts from the pan and pat them dry with some kitchen towel and let them cool down again. Suitably cooled, wrap them in cling film and let them rest in the fridge over night.

The next day you can slice them up nice and thinly and either eat them right then or vacuum pack them for later consumption.

Enjoy!