Duck with Sauce Aigre Douce

This recipe can be found in the masterchef cookbook. The sauce is named aigre douce which is French and means a balance between sweet and sour.

There are 5 parts to this recipe; mini eschalot tart, carrots, celeriac puree, duck breast and sauce.

The eschalot tart was made by caramelising whole eschalots in thyme, balsalmic vinegar and sugar. The eschalots were then placed in muffin tins and topped with puff pastry before being baked until golden. The recipe said to heat the oven to 160 degrees if fan forced but I don't feel this was hot enough to get the pastry nice and crisp and although I cooked the tarts for longer and turned the temperature up for the last 5 minutes the pastry still didn't crisp and was undercooked in parts.

The carrots were made by steaming them in garlic, thyme, whole cloves (I only had ground cloves so just added a little) and chicken stock and then adding a little cream at the end. I added in some broccoli and feel you could easily substitute a variety of vegetables.

I was unable to buy celeriac for the puree so used cauliflower and one potato instead. This was cooked with a bay leaf, cream and milk and then blended and passed through a sieve.

The duck breasts were cooked in the fry pan (skin side down first) and then finished off in the oven. I did cook them a little longer than it said to and this probably caused them to be a little tougher than they should have been but they were still very nice.

Finally the sauce was made by caramelising some sugar in the pan used to cook the duck. I stirred the sugar rather than letting it just melt and this seemed to stop it from melting and caramelising. You then added red wine vinegar, veal glaze or veal stock (which I also couldn't buy, so I just used a little chicken stock), orange zest and orange juice. Finally you whisk in a little butter. As the sugar did not caramelise this sauce was probably sweeter than it was meant to be.

Overall this dish was very tasty. The eschalots were sweet and tender, the vegetables had a nice flavour and the puree and sauce aigre douce worked really well with the duck.

Rating 7-8 out of 10.