Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah

Heston Blumenthal makes us want to tear our hair out.

In his Planet Green series In Search of Perfection, the famously fussy chef gives new meaning to the term ‘obsessive-compulsive’ as he goes to ridiculous lengths in order to “perfect” Britain’s favorite dishes. Nothing’s too outré for Heston, who’s been known to use dry ice to make ice cream, cook a steak with a blowtorch, dig a five-foot-wide crater in his backyard to build a tandoor, and spray the air around his customers with onion juice in order to evoke a chip shop. 

Heston’s screen persona is geeky and self-effacing, and he’s started to grow on me and John. But all too often he does things that make us start yelling at our TV, like spending months tracking down the perfect langoustines for his fish pie and then ruining it with frozen peas, or adding sodium citrate to good English cheddar to give it the texture of nasty, processed American “cheese food.” What’s even crazier is when he suggests viewers can replicate his techniques in their home kitchen, forgetting that most of us don’t have liquid nitrogen or an MRI at our disposal.

We weren’t bothered so much when Heston was spoiling British food, but when he messed with a Chinese classic—Peking duck—we were finally moved to action. In his Peking Duck episode, Heston spent three months trying to roast a duck that had both crispy skin and tender meat. His solution? Remove the skin from the duck, sew it to a cookie rack with twine, and roast it separately from the rest of the duck!

John and I were aghast—we’ve eaten our share of roast duck, most of it with wonderfully crispy skin, and in no case was the skin ever removed from the animal. The classic Peking duck is in fact carved tableside, with the diners served thin slices of skin-plus-meat to wrap in their pancakes. Heston seemed to be reinventing the wheel here with his over-the-top skin-crochet project. Was he onto something, or could you really cook a great Peking duck at home without going to all that trouble?

A quick Google search revealed many Peking duck recipes which promised crispy skin and moist meat. Rachael Ray had one, for crying out loud.  Some involved pumping the duck full of air as Heston had attempted, some didn’t. But all said the key was hanging the duck up to dry for several hours before roasting.

The following Friday found us at Cary’s Grand Asia Market buying a Chinese-style whole duck—one with head and neck and feet still firmly attached, and bearing plastic-wrapped bundles of guts inside its carcass. Using this recipe, John beheaded the duck with one stroke of his cleaver (gruesome, but, I imagine, cathartic) and threaded a chopstick through both its wings in the manner, as the recipe so delightfully noted, “of a crucifix.” Feeling a little like Roman centurions, we dunked the duck into boiling glaze, strung it up from our shower curtain rod with twine, shut the door behind us, and left it in the bathroom to dry.

Our cat Bingley, who watched the whole procedure with avid interest, was driven to distraction by this poultry hanging so tantalizingly close and yet so unreachable. Cats hate closed doors to begin with, but never had a cat hated a door so much as Bingley on that night. We half expected to wake up in the morning to find a bloated Bingley lying on the bathroom floor next to a pile of duck bones. 

The duck hung in the shower overnight, and when we took it down, the skin was taut and dry. John rubbed down the interior with the sauce specified in this recipe, and roasted it for an hour and forty-five minutes, flipping it twice during the procedure. In the meantime, he cooked up some of the “nasty bits,” chopping up the gizzards and heart and stir-frying them in soy sauce, vinegar, rice wine, ginger, and green onions. This was a delicious concoction, every bite flooded with soy-ginger flavor. If you’ve never tried heart before, it’s got this crunchy-fresh texture that’s a little like squid but not as chewy, and very little flavor of its own. Gizzards are similar. Once you get past the idea of eating ‘guts,’ innards are really fairly benign foods. Try them sometime, preferably more than once, in small doses, so you get accustomed to them.

John also pan-seared the duck’s liver, and, yes, liver does have that “iron-y, mineral-y taste” that Andrew Zimmern’s always talking about. It’s like eating a spongy, silty cooked porridge that tastes of nails and earth—I know that sounds horrible, but somehow it’s good. 

Finally the duck was ready. And it was good. We’re talking Chinese-restaurant in China good. The skin had that crispy texture and bronzed sheen that Blumenthal so coveted, and separated neatly from the meat in large sheets. It crackled beneath our teeth and released savory duck fat into our mouths. And the meat was so tender it all but fell off the bone. John couldn’t even cut proper slices but had to separate into bits of “pulled duck” to roll in our pancakes. Awesome. And not that difficult to make, either.

The moral of this story? Tradition is sometimes best. 

(We also couldn’t resist making a video to document the duck-making procedure, and to rib Heston a little bit.)