Tea-smoked duck with tamarind plum sauce

"This recipe is a good way to take your first step into smoking – all you need is a wok with a tight-fitting lid. Frank Shek’s style of tea smoking uses ingredients found throughout China – rice, tea leaves and brown sugar. Frank explains: ‘Away from the wood smoking of other cultures, the Chinese have used what they’ve had to hand and this works perfectly. The tea is there for aroma. The sugar’s there as a form of combustion and the rice is there just to temper the whole lot so you don’t get an explosion.’” Maeve O’Meara, Food Safari Fire

• serves

  4

• prep

  55 minutes

• cook

  2:10 hours

• difficulty

  Ace

On Sydney’s glamorous restaurant strip along Woolloomooloo's Finger Wharf, a jewel of a restaurant called China Doll opened in 2004, and became renowned for its modern take on Chinese classics. The head chef is the charming Frank Shek, who has been an alchemist of flav­ours since the restaurant opened.

Ingredients

• 1x 2 kg duck 
• 2 tbsp Sichuan peppercorns
• ¼ cup sea salt
• 185 g (1 cup) soft brown sugar,
• 200 g (1 cup) jasmine rice, uncooked
• 1 cup jasmine tea leaves
• vegetable oil, for deep-frying
• steamed jasmine rice, to serve

Tamarind and plum sauce

• 2 tbsp tamarind pulp
• 100 ml hot water
• 1 star anise
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 2 cloves
• 2 plums, halved and seeds removed
• 1 tbsp hoisin sauce
• 50 g palm sugar (jaggery), shaved
• 1 tbsp fish sauce

Stir-fried mustard greens

• 1 bunch gai choy (Chinese mustard greens), washed and drained
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 tbsp oyster sauce
• 50 ml (1¾ fl oz) chicken stock
• ½ tsp potato starch, mixed with 1 tsp water

You will need to begin preparing the duck 1 hour prior to smoking.

Cooling time 2 hours

Instructions

To prepare the duck, remove the neck, wings and parson’s nose, along with excess fat from the cavity.

Dry toast the peppercorns and sea salt in a frying pan over medium heat until fragrant and slightly ashen in colour – approximately 2–3 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool slightly before grinding finely in a spice grinder.

Rub the duck inside and out with the salt and pepper mix. Ideally do this an hour before smoking.

Set up a wok lined with foil. Mix the sugar, uncooked rice and tea together. Now make a foil basket with a double layer of foil to hold the rice, sugar and tea mixture. Place in the foil-lined wok.

Place a wire rack over the foil basket large enough to hold the duck, and place the wok on the stovetop over high heat to start generating smoke.

Place the duck on the rack and cover with a tight-fitting lid. Reduce the heat to medium and smoke for 20 minutes. Let the smoke dissipate slightly before lifting the lid.

Remove the duck to a plate, and remove the foil and smoke parcel from the wok.

Set the rack back in the wok and fill with water to just below the rack. Bring to a boil. Place the duck on a large plate and then put back into the wok and cover with the lid. Steam for about 1 hour 30 minutes, checking the water level periodically.

Remove the duck from the wok and cool. Leave in the refrigerator to set, at least for 2 hours. At this stage, you can keep the duck in the fridg­e for up to 3 days.

To make the tamarind and plum sauce, soak the tamarind pulp in the hot water for 10 minutes, then remove. Squish the pulp with gloved hands to extract the liquid – you will need 3 tablespoons of tamarind liquid. Combine the tamarind liquid with the remaining ingredients and a pinch of salt, and bring everything to a simmer. Simmer for around 5 minutes – until the fruit is soft. Season.

Chop the duck in half down the middle. Fry each half in hot oil until crispy – roughly 180°C for 4–5 minutes. Drain on paper towel and rest for a couple of minutes before cutting Chinese style on the bone.

To make the stir-fried mustard greens, blanch the cleaned and washed leaves for 1 minute in a pot of boiling salted water. Drain well. Sauté the garlic and oil in a wok or frying pan over high heat. Add the blanched leaves, oyster sauce and the chicken stock. Season with salt.

Add the starch mixture to the wok and stir to combine. The sauce should thicken.

Serve the duck on steamed jasmine rice with the tamarind and plum sauce and stir-fried mustard greens.

Recipe from Food Safari Fire by Maeve O'Meara (Hardie Grant, hbk, $55).  Photography by Toufic Charabati.

Food Safari Fire starts Thursday 7 January 2016 at 8pm on SBS. Visit the program page for recipes, videos and more.

Cook's Notes

Oven temperatures are for conventional; if using fan-forced (convection), reduce the temperature by 20˚C. | We use Australian tablespoons and cups: 1 teaspoon equals 5 ml; 1 tablespoon equals 20 ml; 1 cup equals 250 ml. | All herbs are fresh (unless specified) and cups are lightly packed. | All vegetables are medium size and peeled, unless specified. | All eggs are 55-60 g, unless specified.

On Sydney’s glamorous restaurant strip along Woolloomooloo's Finger Wharf, a jewel of a restaurant called China Doll opened in 2004, and became renowned for its modern take on Chinese classics. The head chef is the charming Frank Shek, who has been an alchemist of flav­ours since the restaurant opened.