There's More Than One Way to Hang a Duck

An occasional series in which staff members share a recipe that we turn to time and again:

Like many American Jews, I grew up on a steady diet of Chinese restaurant food. My interest in the cuisine and all things Chinese grew, and cooking became a hobby.

Although I now keep to the basics of spaghetti, roast chicken and broiled fish during the week, I enjoy cooking a Chinese feast for 10 or so friends and relatives on some weekends. It's not as daunting as it sounds, although it does require a commitment of a day for chopping and organizing ingredients.

The trick to preparing a Chinese banquet at home is including a couple of easy dishes that can be served cold or done in advance and tucked in the oven to reheat. Believe it or not, I've found that one of those easy dishes is Peking duck.

Usually considered the height of elegance, the duck prepared in restaurants is also usually the most expensive of dishes, often sold for $26 to $30. Making it at home is far from cheap, but it becomes more of an affordable luxury at $15 to $20 for a five-pound duck, depending on sales at the grocery store.

I took a lesson in making Peking duck -- crisp skin, thin pancake wraps and all -- some 15 years ago from Joan Shih, who teaches Chinese cooking in Silver Spring. It turned out to be so simple that now I only roughly follow a recipe drawn mostly from memory, adding honey and wine if more marinade seems necessary. The pancakes for serving are difficult to make just right, so fragile that they are cooked two at a time and then pulled apart. After proving once that I could do it, I now rely on store-bought pancakes (Asian markets carry them, sometimes frozen) that need only steaming before serving.

The other issue is finding a place to hang the duck.

The day before the meal, the duck is scalded for a few minutes and then rubbed on the outside with a mixture of honey, dry sherry or wine, minced ginger and chopped scallions. Then it must hang over a pan overnight to catch the drippings until it is time to roast it in the oven (about an hour before serving). Hanging the bird extracts fat; also, the scalding and marinade make the skin so crisp and delectable that it is served as a separate course at Chinese banquets.

The traditional method of making Peking duck calls for inserting a tube or straw under the skin of the duck's neck, then blowing in air to separate the skin and flesh, so that the skin becomes especially crisp and the remaining fat can render and baste the meat during the roasting.

Ken Hom and Harvey Steiman write in "Chinese Technique" (Simon and Schuster, 1981) that a sorghum stalk usually is used as a tube for blowing but that "an air compressor or a bicycle pump is more effective." As an alternative, they suggest massaging the duck slowly to work the skin away from the subcutaneous layer of fat.

Many of the Chinese cookbooks I've seen dismiss the inflation step as unnecessarily burdensome for the modern home cook. When I asked Shih about it recently, she explained that it is often difficult to buy ducks in the United States with their heads and necks left on.

If you can find a whole bird and want to go the extra yard for crisp skin, remember to tie off the tail vent before you start puffing, and then tie off the neck. Inflate the duck before the scalding step.

The first time I made Peking duck on my own, I lived in a one-bedroom co-op in Adams Morgan that had a small galley kitchen. I loved my old building, which had plenty of character, and I loved the neighborhood, but not the roaches that were nearly impossible to eliminate for any length of time.

Although I was not worried about the possible health consequences of eating a duck that had been left hanging, unrefrigerated, for 24 hours, I couldn't bear the idea of walking into my kitchen to find roaches sticking to its honeyed skin.

As an experienced urban dweller, however, I knew the power of light. After hanging the duck from a cabinet handle conveniently located over the sink, I left the kitchen lights on all night to discourage roaches from coming out to play. I slept poorly, due to the anxiety. So every couple of hours, I got up and banged on the wall separating the kitchen from a narrow hallway, shouting "Stay away!" to my "roommates."

It worked. No roaches.

A half-hour before my guests came, I popped the bird in the oven, checking occasionally over the next hour to siphon off excess fat. I steamed a stack of store-bought pancakes and carved the finished duck.

Judy Sarasohn, a former assistant editor on the Continuous News Desk, took early retirement this fall. She wrote this article before she left.