Sous-vide duck confit

One of the most surprising and controversial discoveries I’ve heard of from the work on Modernist Cuisine is that duck confit doesn’t need to be cooked in fat. A team of professional chefs, when blind-tasting duck prepared different ways (including traditional confit, sous vide with a small amount of duck fat, and precision-steamed), couldn’t tell the difference between them! The important factors were the cooking temperature and a small coating of fat at the end for flavour and to prevent the tasters from telling which preparation was which.

Even before this information came out, sous vide was a popular approach for duck confit, for several reasons. First, an immersion circulator is the perfect way to keep the temperature of your confit stable for a long time. Second, once you’ve already made the capital expenditure on the circulator (which is not inconsiderable), sous vide duck confit is more economical than the traditional method, since it uses substantially less duck fat. And third, a vacuum pouch is a much easier way to store the duck, and you don’t have to dig it out from under a layer of hardened fat.

The approach is fundamentally the same, though: duck legs are cured with a mix of salt and spices, then cooked for a long time at a low temperature. The duck pictured above, made to Modernist Cuisine specs, was cooked at 82°C for 8 hours, before being chilled in an ice bath and refrigerated. The recipe in the book calls for it to be reheated sous vide, then cooked in a frying pan to crisp the skin and served with potatoes also cooked sous vide with duck fat. I skipped those steps and used it in another preparation instead. Either way, this was easily the best duck confit I’ve ever made. The texture was perfect, falling off the bone but succulent. I’m not convinced all the seasonings in the cure came through, but the ones I could taste (especially star anise) were delicious. This is definitely my new standard approach to confit.

Myhrvold observes that, when told there’s no special benefit to cooking duck fully submerged in fat, some traditionalists simply refuse to believe it, despite the evidence.

What do you think: Could you tell sous-vide duck confit from confit cooked the traditional way?

Thanks again to the Society for Culinary Arts and Letters for the preview access to Modernist Cuisine. Come join the discussion!