Duck Prosciutto Flavors

Epicurean Exploits - Food and Recipes
1

Bought a case of duck breasts at the store and was thinking about doing some prosciutto now so I can have it for the holidays.

Any suggestions for spices/aromatics to use?

2

Cured duck breasts some years ago and tried various combinations (all also included salt and black peppercorns; all spices/herbs were dried versions of course):

  • juniper berries/rosemary
  • dried tangerine peel/star anise
  • thyme/coriander seed
  • thyme/smoked paprika/garlic

All good but the winner in a tasting with my friends was the tangerine/star anise cure.

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tangerine sounds epicccccc

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These all sound really interesting. Could you give recipe / method please.

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I don’t have exact recipes and it was more than ten years ago, but I followed (more or less) the procedure from David Leite’s website. As for amounts, I think I just winged it, which I tend to do. For the tangerine/star anise, it was heavy on the tangerine and light on the star anise, which can be a bit of a bully.

I do remember that I weighed the meat before curing it and my (possibly accurate) recollection is that the meat lost about 1/3 of its weight when we deemed it ready.
If I were to do this again, I think I would play around with a koji cure. I’ve used ground koji rice on both duck and beef (overnight in the fridge) before roasting and you get nice intensification of flavour by doing that. Not sure how I’d use koji before a dry/salt cure though.

6

Thank you! I always knew Duck Tape had to be a thing, now I know why!

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oh this reminded me… I need to take the duck out of the cure tonight LOL!

Thanks berserkers.

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