Spicy Shredded Duck with Crackling

Here's my latest MasterChef recipe, the fourth and last in a series of recipes I've written for Woolworths, food sponsors of the latest South African series.

Tender shredded duck with cucumber, spring onions and a
super-crispy topping of duck crackling.

[Click here to go straight to the recipe >>]

This is a sneaky way to make 24 or more delicious canapés using just two duck breasts: first confit the breasts in their own fat, then toss the tender shredded meat with cucumber, spring onions and some sexy Asian flavours, and finally top each portion with golden shards of crunchy duck skin.

This dish is ideal for starting the day before, as the flavour of the duck breasts will improve overnight. I’ve used the five-spice powder sparingly, but feel free to add more if you’d like more perfume in the dish.

This is a great snack for a cocktail party, because you can prepare the duck
a day or two ahead, and put everything together at the last minute. 

For more details about how to confit duck at home, have a look at my recipe for Easy Duck Rillettes.

Finally, this year, it’s not just bloggers getting the chance to get creative in the kitchen along with MasterChef and Woolies. Create a recipe with the same ingredients used each week by the Woolworths Masterchef Competition bloggers and you could win one of fourteen R1000 Woolies gift cards, or the (very!) grand prize of a R10 000 gift card. Head over to the Woolworths Masterchef Hub for more info and T&Cs.

• My first recipe for Woolies/Masterchef:  Slow-Roasted Leg of Lamb with a Basil Walnut Sauce
• My second recipe:  Peppercorn Chicken with Chilli and Mint 
• My third recipe:  Billowing Meringues with a Sunset Berry Coulis

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Spicy Shredded Duck with Crackling

2 boneless duck breasts, skin on
80g spring onions
half a large cucumber
1 tsp (5 ml) Chinese five-spice powder
1 Tbsp (15 ml) Hoisin sauce
4 tsp (20 ml) rice vinegar, to taste
milled black pepper
Maldon sea salt

Heat the oven to 160 ºC. Place the duck breasts, skin side down, in a cold frying pan. Turn on the heat under the pan to its lowest setting, and heat the breasts very slowly and gently for 10 minutes, without disturbing them. This long heating process will help to render the fat.

Turn up the heat in the pan to medium high. Fry the duck breasts in their fat for another 4 minutes, or until the skin is a rich golden colour.  Place the breasts, skin-side up, in a small, shallow ceramic oven dish and pour over all the juices and fat from the frying pan. Sprinkle half a teaspoon (2.5ml) of five-spice powder into the juices, cover with a piece of foil or kitchen paper and bake in the middle of the oven for 20 minutes at 160 ºC.

Now turn down the heat to 120 ºC and roast for 1½ to 2 hours, or until the duck is very soft and succulent.  At this point, you can refrigerate the duck overnight (see Cook’s Notes).

Half an hour before the duck is ready, cut the cucumber in half lengthways and scrape out the seeds with a teaspoon. Cut into neat, small cubes.  Finely slice the spring onion (you’ll use only the purple, white and pale-green parts).

Remove the duck breasts from their cooking dish, peel off their skins and set both aside.  Skim the fat off the top of the remaining juices and reserve – you’ll use this to fry the crackling.

Pull the duck flesh into shreds and place these back into the dish in which you cooked them, tossing well so every shred is coated in juices.  Keep this mixture warm in the oven while you make the crackling.

Sprinkle the remaining half-teaspoon of five-spice powder over the duck skins, then slice them into very fine strips.  Heat the reserved duck fat in a small frying pan and fry the strips over a medium-high heat for a minute or two, or until they are golden brown and crisp. Drain well on kitchen paper and season generously with salt.

Remove the warm shredded duck from the oven and mix in the cucumber cubes and spring onion.  Stir in the hoisin sauce and rice vinegar – to taste - and season with salt and milled black pepper.

Divide this mixture between 24 or more small warmed spoons – or little bowls – and top with the crisp duck crackling. Serve immediately, garnished with baby leaves.

8 as a canapé

Cook's Notes

• If you’d like to prepare the duck the day before, follow the recipe until step 4, then tightly cover the dish containing the cooked breasts with foil and refrigerate it overnight. Gently warm the dish through in the oven before carrying on with the recipe.
• The duck crackling carries on browning for a while when it comes out of the pan, so don’t let it get too dark when you’re frying it.

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Home-Made Baked Spring-Roll-Pastry Cones with Delicious Fillings

I've always loved making interesting little bites for parties and other happy gatherings, and consider this the most exciting and interesting of all cooking challenges.

Smoked-Salmon 'Roses' with Cottage Cheese, Lemon, Capers, Baby Mustard Greens and Chives


Making ten or twelve platters of beautiful, fresh, zingy bites for a party is finicky work and takes many hours and a lot of planning, but there's little to beat the satisfaction you feel when you watch your guests fall like starving puppies on the food, emitting yaps of delight at every mouthful.

For several months now I've been thinking about how to make a small savoury cone. I love the clever and simple design of an ice-cream cone: it's easy to hold, lovely to eat and imbued with all sorts of good seasidey childhood memories. So why not, I thought, serve little 'bouquets' of food in crisp pastry cones? They can't slip out of your fingers, or slither off a plate, and you can grab two or three at a time without having to put down your glass of wine.

Clockwise, from top left: Smoked Salmon Dip with Green Peppercorns; Roast Chicken with Baby Corn, Guacamole and Marjoram; Hot Chicken Curry with Rice, Chutney and Yoghurt; Guacamole with fresh Coriander.

I abandoned ordinary puff pastry and phyllo pastry almost immediately, because the first wasn't firm enough to hold its shape and the second was too delicate and temperamental. Spring-roll pastry, which you can buy in any Chinese food store, was ideal, but I couldn't figure out how to mould it into a perfect cone that could be baked. In the Forties and Fifties, you could buy tin moulds for cream horns in any kitchen shop, but these are a rarity nowadays. After experimenting with cardboard cones of various designs (all of which were failures) I found the solution: commercial ice-cream cones, wrapped in foil.

I expected the cones to collapse in the heat of the oven, but they didn't, and I've found that you can reuse the same foil-wrapped cones up to three times before they disintegrate.

Rolling the pastry around the cones and removing the moulds is, I have to warn you, fiddly, and takes some practice, but once you've got the hang of it, you can easily turn out several dozen in under an hour.

The pastry cones stay perfectly crisp for 24 hours (in fact, some of the left-over cones I made were still crisp after three days). Store them, once they're completely cool, standing up in a bowl, and covered with netting to keep insects away. (If you're living in a humid climate, store them in a cake tin or large lidded container.)

If you're adding a semi-wet or soggy filling to these cones, they should be filled no more than 10 minutes before you serve them. Dryer fillings (for example, smoked salmon or roast chicken) can be added an hour or so before. Fill the bottom part of each cone with torn green leaves (such as rocket, or cos or butter lettuce) that have been thoroughly dried. Don't use a watery lettuce such as iceberg, which will make the cones soggy.

If you're anxious about the cones becoming soggy, take them out of the oven four minutes before the end of the baking time and, using a pastry brush, paint beaten egg all over the inside of each cone. Return them to the oven and bake for a further four minutes. This will 'waterproof' the insides.

You can use either one or two sheets of pastry for each cone. Single-sheet cones are more difficult to make, but are beautifully light and delicate. Double-sheet cones are more robust, and suitable for heavier, wetter fillings. For extra flavour, sprinkle finely grated Parmesan and some salt and pepper between the layers.

As there are bound to be some failures the first time you try this, I suggest you make 16 foil-covered moulds to allow for duds.

To serve the cones, arrange them upright in narrow-sided bowls or vases, or in individual shot glass or (as I've done in these pictures) in tea glasses.

Party food: Home-Made Baked Spring-Roll-Pastry Cones

To make 12 cones, you'll need:
a pack of spring-roll pastry
a large roll of heavy tin foil [aluminium foil]
a box of ice-cream cones
vegetable oil
a little beaten egg

Heat to oven to 180ºC. Take the pastry out of its plastic packaging and wrap it in a slightly damp tea towel.

Place the roll of tin foil on your counter. Using a pair of scissors, cut 12 square pieces of tin foil (to measure out the squares, fold a bottom corner of the foil up to meet the top edge of the foil strip, as you would do if you were making an origami square).

Take the first square of  tin foil and lay it on the counter. Place an ice-cream cone on its side, narrow end  pointing towards you, on the right-hand edge of the foil square. Pick up the edge of the tin foil and roll the cone in an arc to the left, gently squeezing the foil against the cone to enclose it completely. Twist the top open end, as if you were twisting the end of a Christmas cracker, and then gently prod the twisted end down into the wide end of the cone. You'll use this 'handle' to pull the mould out of the pastry casing; make sure it's a big, sturdy twist of foil, or it will break off. Repeat this process with the remaining eleven cones.

Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

Lay a piece of clingfilm or greaseproof paper on the counter and smear it with a light film of vegetable oil. Sprinkle with a little salt (and pepper, if you like). Place a sheet of spring-roll pastry on top, and sprinkle with a little more salt. If you're making double-sheet cones, place another sheet of pastry on top, and brush again with oil. Brush a stripe of beaten egg, using a pastry brush, across the bottom edge of the pastry square (the edge closest to you). Now wrap the mould in the pastry in the same way you wrapped it in foil: place a foil-wrapped cone, narrow end facing you, on the right-hand edge of the pastry sheet, half a centimetre away from the bottom edge. Fold the bottom edge of the pastry over the thin end of the cone, then pick up the right edge and wrap it firmly around the cone as you roll the cone in an arc to the left. Stretch the pastry a little, tucking it under as you go, or you won't get a tight wrap. Press firmly on the the egg-washed edge to seal the cone. 

Now trim the top open edge of the pastry with a pair of sharp scissors to that it protrudes 5 mm above the tim of  foil-wrapped mould.

 This takes some practice to get right, but do persist! Don't worry if there's a little gap at the thin end of the cone.

Place the pastry cone, seam side down, on the lined baking sheet. Repeat this process with the remaining 11 cone moulds.

Bake the cones at 180ºC for 12-15 minutes, or until they are crisp and golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a minute or two. Grasp the twisted end of foil in one hand, and the pastry cone in the other, and gently pull the foil-covered mould out with small yanking movements. If you can't get the mould out, gently snap away any rim of pastry overlapping the mould.

Place the cones on a drying rack and allow to cook completely.

See my notes above for storing and filling filling the cones.

Makes 12. Print Friendly

Sheet Mozzarella Rolls with Sorrel, Lemon, Anchovies and Capers

In the post before this one, I wrote about the interesting sheets of mozzarella I bought from Puglia Cheese in Cape Town, and showed you some beetroot, rocket, lemon and marjoram rolls. Here's the second batch I made, which contain fresh sorrel leaves, lemon zest, white anchovies, capers, garlic and pepper.

As you can see, these rolls don't have the nice circular shape the beetroot ones had. I was going for a pinwheel look, but I found it really difficult to achieve a nice, tight roll when the entire sheet was covered with leaves. (I covered only one edge of the sheet with leaves in the first batch I made; here's a picture). Still, they were delicious, and tasted even better the next day, when the flavours had had a chance to develop. You could blanch the leaves, I suppose, to make them more flat and pliable, but they would lose their fresh bite (and perhaps become slimy in the fridge).

I used red-vein sorrel leaves from my garden, which have a lovely sour bite, but you could use any similar fresh green leaf.

Sheet Mozzarella Rolls with Sorrel, Lemon, Anchovies and Capers

a sheet of fresh mozzarella
the finely grated zest of a lemon
2 large cloves of garlic, peeled
a pinch of flaky sea salt
3 T (45 ml) capers
6 white Italian anchovy fillets, or 4 of the brown, tinned kind
3 T (45 ml) olive oil
salt and freshly milled black pepper
fresh sorrel, beetroot or rocket leaves

To serve:
olive oil
extra capers
crusty bread

Place a sheet of clingfilm or baking paper on your kitchen counter and smear it with some olive oil. Sprinkle with a little salt and freshly milled black pepper. Pat the mozzarella sheet quite dry using kitchen paper, and place it on the clingfilm.

Put the lemon zest, garlic and salt in a mortar and pound to a coarse paste. Finely chop the capers and the anchovies and stir them into the paste, along with the olive oil.  Smear the mixture evenly all over the mozzarella sheet. Season generously with freshly milled black pepper, and a little more salt, if necessary. Arrange the sorrel leaves all over the top; don't worry if they overlap slightly. Now pick up the edge of the clingfilm and nudge the sheet into a roll, as you would do if you were making sushi. Roll, away from you, into a neat sausage. Wrap clingfilm round the roll and tightly twist the ends in opposite directions to make a tight 'salami'.

Place in the fridge to firm up for two hours (or longer). Now, using a very sharp knife, slice directly through the plastic to make discs. Place on a plate for half an hour to bring to room temperature. Just before serving,  drizzle with olive oil and scatter with extra capers and a few grinds of black pepper. Serve immediately with plenty of fresh crusty bread for mopping up the juices.

Makes about 15. Print Friendly

Sheet Mozzarella Rolls with Beetroot, Rocket, Lemon and Marjoram

I was intrigued to come across these beautiful sheets of mozzarella, which are produced in Cape Town by Puglia Cheese, a little family firm that has taken the local foodie community by storm. Puglia provided a selection of their exquisite (and I mean drop-dead delicious) cheeses for tasting at the second Neill Anthony Masterclass (more about that soon), which I organised with my friend Judy.

While Judy was at the factory picking up the cheeses, she bought a kilo of this fabulous sheet mozzarella, and we shared it.

Quite apart from the fact that this is authentic Italian mozzarella of the highest quality,  this product is very special because it is so versatile; its delicate, milky deliciousness is a perfect foil for punchy flavours. You can add just about anything you like to a mozzarella roll: the classic Caprese combination of tomato and basil, or fresh herbs of your choice, or garlic, lemon, olives, capers, anchovies, roasted peppers, chillies and other singing flavours of the Mediterranean. I've just make a second roll, which is firming in the fridge as we speak, containing fresh sorrel and beetroot leaves, lemon zest, white anchovies, capers, garlic and pepper.

Making  these canapes took me just a few minutes, although I did put the roll in the fridge for an hour to firm up. (And no, I didn't matchstick the beetroot myself! I took them, and the rocket,  from a packet of Woolworths's new beetroot and cranberry salad.)

Do leave the rolls, once you've sliced them, at room temperature for half an hour or so, to lose their chill, and place them on the biscuits or crostini just before serving them, as the cheese tends to weep.

You can spread the filling all over the cheese to achieve a pin-wheel effect, but I found that this made the 'sausage' of cheese difficult to roll neatly.

Sheet Mozzarella Rolls with Beetroot, Rocket, Lemon and Marjoram

a sheet of fresh mozzarella
the finely grated zest of a small lemon
a large clove of garlic, finely crushed
3 T (45 ml) olive oil, plus more for topping
salt and freshly milled black pepper
2 T (30 ml) fresh marjoram leaves (or oregano)
fresh rocket leaves
fresh beetroot, cut into matchsticks

To serve:
olive oil
crackers or crostini

Place a sheet of clingfilm or baking paper on your kitchen counter and smear it with some olive oil. Sprinkle with a little salt and freshly milled black pepper. Pat the mozzarella sheet quite dry using kitchen paper, and place it on the clingfilm.

In a small bowl, mix together the lemon zest, garlic and olive oil. Season with salt and pepper. Smear the mixture evenly all over the mozzarella sheet. Arrange the marjoram leaves, rocket leaves and beetroot sticks  along the edge of the mozzarella sheet closest to you. Now pick up the edge of the clingfilm and nudge the sheet into a roll, as you would do if you were making sushi. Roll, away from you, into a neat sausage. Wrap clingfilm round the roll and tightly twist the ends in opposite directions to make a tight 'salami'.

Place in the fridge to firm up for an hour. Now, using a very sharp knife, slice directly through the plastic to make discs. Place on a plate for half an hour to bring to room temperature. Just before serving, arrange the discs on biscuits or crostini and drizzle with olive oil. Serve immediately.

Makes about 15.

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