How To Roast A Duck

Well, I am going to show you how to roast a duck today. And the first thing you need to do is to give it a good old wash. So, rinse it down a kitchen faucet or pass it down, which we have already done.

You could then just stuff the cavity full of whatever you like. This is really a very, very simple thing to do. Cooking chicken is a similar sort of level of simplicity.

Actually, the first thing we should do - I am going to give my hand a very quick wipe because I have just touched the bird. We are going to touch a little bit of black pepper there, just on the outer edges of the carcass. I am going to put some thyme in there.

I have also got some garlic here and although I peeled it, I am just sort of roughly chopping it. Here we go! Just stuff that in. You know, I never had enough garlic in something like this, it just permeates.

If you really want to go wild, you can just rub the outer skin. Actually, what I am going to do is I just rub some duck fat which I am going to smear over the outer skin, and then, what you can then, do if you really like, you put some orange dust in the skin like that. You just get some extra skin and you can just rub it into the skin just like that.

I find for the chicken lemon is a particularly good one. Just get some citrusy flavor in that. Then, of course, you could add little bit of citrus or a bit of orange.

I think something about cooking, you know, fill whatever you got or like in the cavity. You know, good old onion is just like anything. In the past, I have cooked poultry without putting anything in the cavity and it just tastes just so bland.

You know, I get fed up, this piece gets bang about sort of thing, but actually, I really mean it. Bit of black pepper, not much, bit of salt and I am going to turn it upside down. Just finish off with little bit of extra fat on to it.

And here we go, little bit of black pepper, take final bit of orange, just rub that in there; just give that little bit of extra flavour, maybe a little bit of more dust here. But this is effectively all I am going to do now, it's to just shovel in the oven and roast for about an hour and half. Now, the thing is I always like to roast whole poultry upside down; like that first for about first half-an-hour.

A lot of oven convect heat from the top so when you do roast this way, you manage to get those legs and thighs nicely, nice and evenly cooked and the skin nicely brown and so when you turn it over for the last hour, you are getting the benefit. Well, that goes in. My oven is 170.

Most domestic conventional ovens are un-fan assisted and I would say 180 degrees. That is a small duck getting about 1.5 Kilos.

So, I would probably cook that for something like an hour and a half. The rule of thumb is generally 20 minutes to a pound plus 15 minutes to start off with and then just have a lucky dip in the end with little longer. When cooking anything in the oven, the amount of time you let it cook outside the oven makes the difference.

Now, you want to do it slightly, marginally undercooked comes out of the oven, you got to rest there for good 10 minutes, I just sat there with a tin foil over the top and during that time, it continued to cook through with all that lowly juice to flow. We have got to look at that - we come back in about what I suspect to be about half-an-hour time. We turn it round and then cook it for a further hour and then you see the roast duck in its entirety at the end of the cooking process.

So, that is about half an hour now, so you can see that beautifully roasted on the top. So what I am going to do now, by using my tongs, turned over just an oven little tip and it is worth doing this, if you can, just giving a good oil base. So that is going to go back now in the oven now for, well, I would normally say another 45 minutes, may be half an hour, it is only a small duck.

He is looking instead of about probably half an hour left in there. This duck i