Duck Prosciutto 4.0 STEP 2!

The finished product!

Before I get into the next step of my Duck Prosciutto recipe let me make one thing clear. There are some things I didn't cover in my last post.

I hate to say it but I made some assumptions about YOU the reader. I have to apologize! Don't take this the wrong way, I'm going to cover some basic stuff that you need to do or you could get sick. A couple days on the ceramic throne sick! On to the serious stuff.

Please keep your stuff clean! I mean, your cutting boards, knives, your scale, all of it, but most importantly keep your hands clean! I know it's a pain but of all things, we cross-contaminate more with our hands than with any other possible utensil!


The best way to clean your stuff? About a half a gallon of water with 2 tsp of bleach! That's it, cheap, easy and right there under the sink!

Okay now that the health and safety is taken care of on to part two of our recipe!

Things you will need:
2 salted duck breast
paper towels
butchers twine
digital scale
a small plate
refrigerator or cold dark basement
cheesecloth (optional)
between 7-10 days or 2 weeks
Plenty of hot water and soap (not OPTIONAL)

Now that your duck breasts have cured in the salt and pink salt for at least 1 day and not more than 2 days (I like 36 hours) you can take it out of the fridge and clean off the salt and spices. I wash it under warm water to clean off the salt and stuck on pieces of herbs. As you handle the it you will notice that the duck has sort of stiffened. That is the wonder of salt both the pink and regular salt doing its job!

Salted and seasoned!

Once I have cleaned off the salt dry the duck with paper towels and set them aside I move on to the scale... 

NOT! I wash my hands!

Please keep washing your hands throughout this process! You'll feel so good knowing you didn't poison someone!

After you have washed your hands, get the out the scale. I like to weigh my duck before wrapping and trussing. In doing so I find out if the right amount of drying is happening. Some recipes simply call for 7-10 days of drying. Others call for 30% of the weight to be lost in hanging and drying.

I'll be honest both ways work. I have tried each one and each one works as well as the other.

Note the starting weight of the duck breast

Moving on, using the 'tare' function place a small plate on the scale and hit the 'tare' button to zero out the weight of the plate. Note the weight of each piece of duck and record that weight. If your duck starts out at 124 grams then your duck should lose 37 grams (30% of the weight) during the course of drying.

The next step is to truss the breast, basically you are wrapping it with string to make it easier to hang, this video shows the easiest way to truss a piece of meat in the range we have with a duck breast, http://youtu.be/iDtLRqoHb9A I know the graphics and intro are hokey but the technique works.


Before you truss the duck there is another option you need to choose, cheesecloth or no cheesecloth? I am trying no cheesecloth this time around. But as with everything everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Now that you have wrapped and trussed the duck, or not! You can hang it in the fridge! How you do that is up to you! I have glass shelves in my fridge and have a hanger that I have bent into a special rig to hang my duck.






Now comes the test of your patience! You might need to wait up to 2 weeks for this to cure. If you decide to weigh your duck, the first couple of days you will see quite a bit of weight coming off your duck breast, then about 5 days into the process it will slow to a crawl. My buddy Brennan likes to feel the difference in his duck. It seems that when the duck stops feeling "squishy" it is ready, that happens in about 10 days. 

Now go wash your hands!!!

Duck prosciutto 4.0

This week I started to cure some more duck prosciutto. This project is something I could do over and over again... And it's something I will do. Over the course of the next couple of days I will keep posting my progress. For today I have done the cure! The recipe is as follows:

1 TBSP of pink salt
1 cup of salt
4 TBSP peppercorns
16 allspice berries
1tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp orange peel
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 whole duck breasts (about 1 1/2 lbs)

At this stage you need to see whether the duck breast needs to be cut or kept whole. If the breasts are a good size you can cut the whole breasts into two pieces and cure them separately. If you keep the breast whole you need to make sure all the nooks and crannies are coated in just the pink salt.

The peppercorns allspice and mustard seeds all need to be toasted in order to bloom the oils and flavors. Let the spices cool and then grind to fairly coarse grind. Then you mix your orange peels and freshly ground nutmeg along with the salt and your freshly ground spices together. Liberally coat all of your duck breast with the salt rub (if you have the whole breast don't forget to coat the whole breast) and place in a zip lock bag. Once you have done that you can pour the rest of the salt cure over the breasts and distribute that throughout the bag! Let the bag sit in a bowl or on a plate to avoid cross-contamination in case of a leak.

For the next 24 to 48 hours that can sit in the fridge.
(Here endeth part 1 of the recipe)

So just some notes on the finer points:
1. Pink salt (sodium nitrate) can be bought online or at a butcher supply. I bought mine on Amazon.com. I little bit goes a long ways. More does not mean better but you do want to coat the meat entirely.

2. The duck breast I buy are free range and I get them at Whole Foods and Bristol Farms, the only thing is you need to get them as fresh as possible and use then as soon as possible.

3. The spices can be whatever you want. I tend towards warmer spices. Cardamom cloves and allspice are my favorites. They come through in the duck when the cure is complete.

4. Thanks to Michael Ruhlman for his book Charcuterie!

Next post wrapping trussing and hanging!

Duck Prosciutto

 This was an experience!!!

Making duck prosciutto was an exercise in patience! In the end totally worth it. I have to thank my buddy Brennan for being my sounding board about all of my home cooking/curing experiences.

After experimenting with homemade bacon and brining my own Canadian bacon I decided to try my hand at duck prosciutto. After looking online for some Muscovy duck breast I settled on the duck breast from the Bristol Farms. It was kind of thin but the dark rich duck meat looked good. I won't go into details about the process today (but I will in a future blog)

I seasoned the salt with herbs before I buried the duck breast in it. So in the strictest sense what you will see here isn't really prosciutto. I let that stay in the fridge for 2 days waiting for the salt to dry out the outside of the breast.

After that 2 days I wrapped, trussed, and hung the breast in my fridge for about 7 days.

 Around the 5th day I could feel the edges harden just a bit and the squishyness of the center started to 
go away.

I didn't just go off the "feel" of the duck to decide to open up the cheesecloth. I used a scale to weigh the duck each day. When it lost about 30% of it's weight I decided to try some duck prosciutto!

Just like a week ago!

I cut the trussing and unwrapped the cheesecloth. Honestly I wasn't expecting it to look almost exactly the same as when I put it in the wrapping. But it did!

I grabbed my sharpest slicing knife to try and cut the thinnest slices possible. The skin side of the breast sliced very easily and as you sliced into the breast the harder dryer parts of the underside of the breast were a little tough to cut.

All in all I really enjoyed the experience. I definitely am going to do this again!