We thought it would be so sophisticated to roast a Duck on the Big Green Egg. We did a terrible job and as good as it looks, it wasn't. Nevertheless, it was our first time and we will try again eventually but we aren't in a hurry to do this again.
Research:We googled around and found this youtube video and tried to follow it.
Ingredients:
We bought a free range hippy duck
and we used a great dry rub
Plan:
Heat the Egg to 325, boil the duck to release some fat, cook it to temperature. 165 -170 degrees.
Execution:
First we trimmed it according to the video or maybe a little less. I didn't cut the tail bone and should have so it would have fit on the "can" better.
Then dry rubbed it and as suggested we sliced through the fat
Rendered fat - save for later
We cooked the duck until it was 170 degrees. We overshot this a little as our duck was very lean and didn't have a lot of meat like a chicken might have. Also, I was checking both the thigh and the breast and had difficulty measuring. Also consider that it didn't take nearly as long as the video. Maybe 30 minutes to get to 170 in the breast or leg.
It was incredibly tough and chewy. Sort of like it hadn't been cooked enough maybe? I don't know if I cooked it too much or not enough but the breast was tough and the thigh was even worse. I'll need to do some research to try and figure out what we did wrong. I am inclined to believe that I didn't cook it enough.
Regardless, it was a lovely evening on the patio. We ended the evening warming up leftovers.
This was far and away the worst meal we have made on the Big Green Egg. I don't know yet what I did wrong but suffice to say, they don't always turn out great.
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After watching some more videos and reading more. I think we didn't cook it long enough and I didn't get good temperature measurements. Next time, I'll stuff the duck and I'll cook it until 175 everywhere.
I feel good about using THIS video from Maple Leaf Farms as instruction next time.