There’s an art to breaking down a whole duck, and there’s an art to cooking that duck well once you’ve broken it down. To get a juicy and tender duck that doesn’t taste overly gamey, you just want a few ingredients: salt, water, and orange juice. This two-step process first involves soaking your duck in a brine and then letting it marinate in orange juice, and it’s just as easy as it sounds.
Start with pieces of meat that are already cleaned and prepared, with the fat trimmed to your liking. Mix salt and water in a ratio of about 1 to 16. You can use table salt or sea salt, or any other kind of salt you want (except Epsom salt, which is straight-up unpleasant to eat and can cause stomach troubles). Just boil the water and mix in the salt until dissolved, then let it cool completely. When you add the duck, make sure it’s fully submerged, and let it rest in the fridge at least overnight.
Then, you can let your duck soak in plain orange juice or use a simple citrus-based marinade to ensure you have a delicious and well-balanced flavor profile to work with. That requires you to give your duck another trip to the fridge for at least a few hours, so while this process is easy, it may be a couple of days before you actually eat your bird.
The science behind why this marinade method works
You may be asking yourself whether brining meat makes an actual difference. And the answer is yes, it sure as heck does. When you soak gamey animals in brine, the salt actually aids in drawing the blood out of your meat thanks to osmosis, a process where the higher concentration of salt in the brine pulls fluid, including blood, from the meat’s tissues to try and reach an equilibrium. That blood is where some of the strong and potentially off-putting flavor people attribute to gaminess comes from, since wild animals basically work out more than domesticated ones and thus have higher iron levels in their blood, along with more circulation of it. So essentially, the longer you soak your meat, the more it leaches out some of the elements that make your bird taste gamey.
After you’ve taken out most of the gamey taste with your salt brine, it’s time to let your citrus marinade shine. Orange pairs well with the richness of duck and cuts through some of the heaviness and fat, making it a brighter and mellower tasting experience. Orange juice brings sweetness to the dish that complements the savory taste of duck meat well. The acid in citrus can also help tenderize meat by breaking down the connective tissue in it. This works particularly well with wild duck, which some people view as quite gamey compared to more common poultry like chicken. But this brine-and-marinade combo works well on all ducks along with other gamey meats like venison, so don’t be afraid to give it a test run on your favorites.
