Chinese Duck and Noodle Stir Fry

GBS Food Article

Preamble

Whenever I go to a chinese restaurant, they've always got some funky dish with duck, that you've got no idea how they cooked. This weekend, I grabbed some reasonable looking ingredients, and decided to embark on a stroll into some chinese-style cookery. This was loosely based on one of the recipes from the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/d...wit_70791.shtml), except, I didn't have all the ingredients, and I decided to make some variations as I went along.

Enough blithering, on to the recipe:

Recipe Information

Serves: One person per duck breast by my estimation. Preparation Time: 20-30 minutes.

Ingredients

• Duck breasts - with or without skin, it doesn't really matter. I had two, one is fine, more is fine. Two was enough for two meals for me.
• Noodles - I'm using some rice noodles, any will do
• Ginger
• Some vegetables - For me, some peppers and some carrots
• Garam Masala, Chilli Powder, Tumeric, Cinnamon, Paprika (1 teaspoon of each).
• Vegetable/Nut Oil - I utilized some sesame oil for frying the meat, and some groundnut oil for the stir fry
• Soy sauce.
• Lemon juice/lime juice.

Equipment

• Frying Pan.
• Wok.
• Small bowl.
• Couple of plates
• Tray for the oven
• An oven, preheated to 500F, or 250 Deg C/Gas Mark 9.

Making the Duck Noodle Stir Fry

1. Place the Garam Masala, Chili Powder, Turmeric, Cinnamon, and Paprika into the small bowl, and mix them together.

2. Cut up your vegetables, and ginger (the ginger needs to be in pretty tiny places), and put them to the side, you don't really have time to cut them up later, so it's a good idea to get it out of the way. Cut them to the size that you like veg in a stir fry to be (for me that's defined by how easy it is to eat it with chop sticks).

3. The spice is going to need to coat all of the duck breasts that you have, pour out a reasonable proportion (~half of it for two duck breasts) onto a plate. Take one of the pieces of duck, and roll both sides of it in the spices, until it's completely coated. Repeat for all of the other duck breasts.

4. Pour some of your chosen oil into the frying pan. Heat the pan up until the oil has just started to smoke.

Put the pieces of duck into the pan and commence to fry both sides.

This will probably take between 4 and 5 minutes, make sure to turn the pieces of duck over. The idea is to get the spices to stick to the duck, and begin to get it cooked.

When the duck's looking like this, it's probably pretty well sealed, and ready for moving to the oven.

The duck's going to need to be in the oven for between 7 and 10 minutes, so it's time to start on the stir fry while it cooks.

5. Put the rice noodles into the wok, with the chopped veg.

Add some soy sauce, and lemon juice to your personal taste (this'll probably take a little experiementing, just be fairly minimal with both if you're unsure).

Stir fry the vegetables and noodles until the soy sauce looks to be fairly even, whilst allowing the vegetables to remain crunchy.

6. Get the duck out of the oven. Using a sharp knife slice it open down the centre horizontally. Check that the meat inside looks cooked properly, you don't want to be eating duck with a raw inside, the picture below isn't so clear, but the duck is the same fleshy pink all the way through:

If it looks cooked properly, slice the duck into fairly small slices, add to the stir fry, and serve!

Enjoy!