Homemade Peking Duck Recipe with Crispy Crackling Skin, Served with Homemade Soft Chinese Pancake

Homemade Roasted Peking Duck with Crispy and Crackling Skin

Peking duck is the most popular duck dish in chinese cuisine around the world. Roasted Peking Duck is prized for its thin, crispy and crackling skin. Authentic versions of peking duck used to be dish served or carved the skin and little meat, skillfully sliced by the cook in front of the diners. The rest of the meat is eaten with scallion, cucumber and hoisin sauce with homemade chinese pancakes rolled around the fillings.

Homemade Version Roasted Peking Duck

Homemade Roasted Peking Duck Recipe is quite an effort with hectic and prescise step by step preparation. All the effort worthed when you’ve making your homemade peking duck that mostly away cheaper than chinese restaurant along the fact that you’ve could adjust the test of your homemade peking duck. Once you’ve try making peking duck  very on kitchen,  it’s actually not really that hard, i even adjust the bycycle pump that used to plump the duck skin with ball pump as long as you can lifted up and seperate the skin from the meat. I’ve try  this method for making Crispy Roasted Chicken with Herbs Butter Recipe, ant it’s turn out successfully.

Crispy and Crackling Homemade Roasted Peking Duck

Peking Duck with Moist, Aromatic and Tender Meat

How to pump air under the duck skin is quite tricky, you can’t skip this step if you wanted your peking duck crispy. Air is pumped to separate the skin from the fat and let the fat under the skin renderred and being “fried” out the skin until crisp. The trick is you put your pump tips under the duck skin without pierching it’s meat through the neck cavity, seal the airway to make sure all the air from the pump entering the soft tissue underneath the duck skin. Once the duck skin is raised up, you may push or slightly palpate the duck skin to distribute the air underneath the duck skin. After one side, flip out the duck and doing the same treatment with another side.

Pump The Peking Duck with Balloon Pump from The Neck Skin

I like my roasted peking duck meat is tasty, quite spicy with  nice aromatic, moist and fork tender. Sometimes the chef in the chinese restaurant is too focus on the crispy skin highlight and let the meat overcooked and dry. Honestly, i think it’s a kinda unnecessary waste . That’s why one of my friend who is a junior executive chef in famous chinese restaurant in Palembang told me that i need to spiced up the duck cavity and then seal it good. He recommended to rub salt throught out the skin and cavity and then dust the cavity with a generous amount of bumbu ngohiang or chinese five spice powder, sliced ginger, chopped scallion and few cloves of crushed garlic. Once you’ve stuffed the duck cavity, seal it with bamboo skewer or you can sew it with butcher twines. The cavity stuffing gives a nice aromatic flavour and keep the moisture in the cavity, then the peking duck would be flavoursome, moist and tender. Never forget to discard the oil gland (Uropygial Gland) from the duck tail since it’s had stink aromas, but you should keep the pope’s nose since it’s quite meaty there.

After the duck skin being pumped or blown out and the cavity is well sealed, now it’s the glazing step.  The duck is glazed with soy sauce, maltose and chinese red yeast rice or angkak as natural coloring agent mixture.  You can purchase the red rice in almost chinese groceries store nearby your place, if you can’t find any, instead you can simply use food coloring  and adjust the consistency of the glazing mixture with cornstarch.  While the duck is hung, the duck is glazed with the boiling glazing mixture until the duck skin is thighten, and the duck skin changing it’s color into nice reddish brown.

The Peking Duck is Glazed Until The Duck’s Skin is Thighten and The Skin Color is Nice Reddish Brown

Drying out the duck skin is the next crucial step. You can expose the glazed peking duck with blowing fan for a couple of minutes then let the duck stand for 24 hours until the skin is totally dry in a dry cold place. This steps is sounds easy to do if you live in a cold climates, but if you live in tropical climates like me; letting the duck standing in room temperature for 24 hours may iniciate the bad bacteria and fungus spores to ruined out your duck. That’s why i suggest to hung dry your duck in your fridge. Instead, you can laid it down in a shallow and hollow metal rack to allow the air circulated all over the duck skin, but i more like to hung out my duck in my fridge door, just like what i did to dry cure my Homemade Bresaola Recipe and Homemade Duck Prosciutto.

The glazed peking duck is hung to dry in a fridge door!

The peking duck skin is totally dry and it’s ready to be roasted!

Peking Duck is traditionally roasted in either a closed oven or hung oven, but eversince my oven is to small for that, i used my shallow and hollow baking rack with a tray underneath.  Preheat the oven to 170ºC/325ºF. Place the duck in a roasting tray and put it in the oven for about 2 minutes. You should discard the excess water and oil dripping from the duck every 10 minutesor your duck is steamed instead of roasted. This will make the skin go wonderfully crispy. Generally, after a 40 minutes it will be perfect,the leg meat will pull off the bone and the skin will be wonderfully crisp. You don’t always need to, but I sometimes turn the heat up to 200ºC/400ºF/for 5 or more minutes until it’s really crispy and cracking.

Shining Roasted Peking Duck, The Oli Gland is Totally Removed from the Duck’s Tail

Serving  your homemade roasted peking duck is quite optional; you can eat it either with steaming hot rice, steamed buns or mandarin pancake.To made youer live easier, you can buying a couple of packs of pre-made chienese pancakes which you can place in a steamer or microwave and slowly steam until nice and hot. But eversince i’m too lazy to work out my butt to the supermarket, i like to made the chinese pancake from scratch. The basic recipe is quite simple, just like my Homemade Tortilla Recipe, but you just recplace the water with boiling water.

Roasted Peking Duck, Chinese or Mandarin Pancake with Condiments and Vegetables

Once the duck has cooled a little bit, use two forks to cut out the meat off the carcass and place it in a plate. You can served it with plenty of greens and condiment sauce. i prefer using sweet bean paste sauce a.k.a hoisin sauce and spicy chilli sauce. I also add plenty of veggies within the roasted peking duck and pancake roll; thinly sliced scallion and cucumber, thinly shaved carrot, baby romain lettuce hearth and some pea sprout.

Nic Stuffing for Chinese Peking Duck Pancake Roll

 I would love to tell you the way how i roll out my chinese pancake with my thinly sliced roasted peking duck. Starting by spreading the hoisin sauce and some spicy chilli sauce in the middle of the pancake and followed by placing the vegetables and the sliced roasted peking duck. After that i fold the base of the pancake and then fold out with slightly rolleing movement the pancake horizontally and let the other side of the pancake exposing the goodness inside.

Step by step instruction how to wrap the roasted peking duck with chinese pancake

Enjoy Your Roasted Peking Duck Wrapped in Chinese Pancake!

Another Shoots of Roasted Peking Duck Wrapped in Chinese Pancakes!

 Homemade Peking Duck Recipe with Step by Step Instructions:

Ingredients:

• One 2- 2.5 kg Peking Duck
• Salt for rubbing

Peking Duck Stuffing Recipe:

• few slice ginger
• 1 bunch of roughly chopped scallions

Peking Duck Glazing Recipe:

• 4 cups Water
• 1 tablespoon Salt
• 1 cup Chinese Cooking Wine/dry sherry
• 1/2 cups Rice Vinegar
• 1/4 cups Red Yeast Rice powder or Angkak (replace with 1 tbsp red food coloring plus dissolved 2 tablespoons cornstarch)
• 1/2 cup Maltose or Honey
• 2 tbsp Chinese Five Spice Powder
• Few slices of Ginger
• 1 roghly chopped Scallion

How To Make Homemade Roasted Crispy Peking Duck:

1. Making The Peking Duck Glaze:

•  Place the water into a large wok pan, add the chinese five spice powder, ginger and scallion, bring it  to boil and let it boil gently for about 10 minutes
• Strain the mixture through a fine sieve and discard the solid ingredients, put the liquid back into the large wok
• Dissolved the rest of the peking duck glazing ingredients and keep stirring and bring it to boil, turn off the heat and set aside

2. Preparing the Peking Duck

• Clean duck inside out and wipe dry
• Discard the oil gland from the tail and cut the wing’s tips and the duck feet
• Rub  the duck all over  with salt
  
• Pump the skin to seperate it from the meat with bicycle or balloon pump from the neck skin
• Put the stuffing ingredients inside the ducks cavity and seal it good with  bamboo skewer
• Bring the glazing ingredients to boil
• Hung the duck and then pour the glazing mixture all over the duck skin until it thighten out and the skin color is rurn into nice reddish brown
• Expose the glazed peking duck with blowing fan for about 30 minutes and let it stand for another 24 hours in a cold and dry place (i placed the duck in my fridge)
• When the duck duck is really dry, preheat oven to 170ºC, put the duck in a shallow and hollow baking rack and make sure the roasted duck dripping can’t touch the skin
• Let the peking duck roasted for about 10 minutes and discard or spoon out the dripping from the tray and continue to roast another 30 minutes (discard the dripping every 10 minutes)
• Increase the heat to 200ºC/400ºF and let it roasted for another 5 minutes until the skin is very-very crispy
• When your homemade peking duck is done, carved it and served it with the homemade pancake and other condiments

Homemade Chinese Pancake Recipe for Roasted Peking Duck:

Ingredients

• 450 grams plain flour
• 310 ml boiling water
• 1 teaspoon vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup sesame oilplus 1 tbsp cornstarch
  

Method

1. Stir the boiling water into the flour, add the oil and knead into a firm dough. Cover with a damp towel or cling film and set aside 30 mins. Knead dough 5 mins until smooth.
2. Divide and roll into three cylinders, cut each cylinder into 8-10. Roll each piece of dough into a ball and press into a flat disc with the palm of your hand.
3. Dip one side of the dough  disc with sesame oil then place another dough disc on top of it. Using a rolling pin, flatten each pair of discs into a 6 inch pancake. Heat an ungreased frying pan over high heat, then reduce the heat to low and place the pairs of pancakes, on at a time, into the pan.
4. Turn over when brown spots start to appear on the underside. When the second side is cooked, lift the pancakes out and carefully peel them apart.
5. Fold each pancake in half with the cooked side facing inwards, and set aside under a damp cloth. For 10 mins before serving, steam the pancakes in a steamer over simmering water.

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