Perfectly Fried Duck Breast Fillets with the Best Sauce

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• Duck - the perfect ingredient to many dishes
• How should fried duck breast fillets be served
• Other cooking techniques for fried duck breast fillets
• Ingredients and equipment
• The secret method to perfectly fried duck breast fillets
• How to make the best wine sauce
• More delicious dinner recipes to try
• Perfectly fried duck breast fillets recipe

Crispy skin, juicy, tender fried duck breast fillets served with the most flavoursome wine sauce, trust us this is a bullet-proof method that will produce the most perfectly cooked duck breast fillets every time.

Duck - the perfect ingredient to many dishes

Duck is an incredible ingredient and star of many classic dishes such as Duck à l’Orange, cassoulet, duck confit, Chinese roast duck, crispy duck pancakes, salmi of duck, ballotine of duck, duck Voisin, duck rillettes, duck with plum sauce, tamarind sauce, Sauternes or truffles. The list is extensive and doesn’t stop there.

One thing that you may note about duck is that it is often used for signature dishes whether in restaurants or at home. It has a wonderful flavour and whether you use the whole bird to roast or the legs which can slow cook or confit or the breast which you can fry the end result is impressive.

Perhaps it is this impressive nature reserved for more expensive ingredients that potentially leads to duck being underused and maybe only cooked for special occasions. Then the duck gets revered, potentially too much and then it can become an ingredient that gets avoided. The reason for this is simple, it is a great impressive and flavoursome ingredient but it is really easy to mess up! Perhaps not the dark meat so much as if you slow cook the legs such as the way confit duck is prepared, this will produce a tender fully cooked bird where the meat is succulent and falls off the bone. The issue is with the duck breasts, which ultimately are the more impressive cuts especially more prevalent in restaurants. The Voisin for example, which was a lauded french restaurant in Paris during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s had a classic duck dish named after it and the Tour d’Argent in Paris is notably the world’s best duck restaurant today, most likely serving duck voisin. However, the Voisin has long gone but its duck namesake continues. It is straightforward to cook duck breasts but to cook them to perfection like the dizzying heights these exceptional restaurants can propel these dishes (and their prices) no wonder it feels like a risky meat to put on the menu.

How should fried duck breast fillets be served

There is a point at which perfection can be achieved with fried duck breast fillets.

Chefs train to understand the timings for a perfectly cooked duck breast either by sight or by using thermometers or gadgets and gizmos, not really found in the average home kitchen. They also understand the different techniques that can be used.

For example, How long does it fry for? What heat should the hob be on? Do you part fry the breast then put in the oven? Is it best-cooked sous vide (a water bath) Do you use oil? Do you season the duck? What do you season it with and all this comes before the question of what you serve it with?

The best fried duck needs to be medium-rare

Duck can be served obviously to your preference, whether rare or up to well done but for the optimal finished product, it needs to be medium-rare. It needs to be succulent when cut but at no point should it bloody! Pink or reddish in colour, absolutely but not blood running over your plate.

When we say blood, it is in fact myoglobin which is a protein that oxygenates muscle tissue rather than hemoglobin which oxygenates blood. The iron it contains turns red when exposed to oxygen but heat will turn it a darker colour hence the lack of red in a well-cooked duck breast. A completely raw piece of duck has no blood in it, just a red colour that will turn more greyish the more it is cooked. The red liquid will come out if not cooked and rested correctly too and this aspect is important to avoid. 

Once a perfectly medium rare meat is achieved and it doesn’t “bleed” the texture will not be dry and tough which it would be if it were cooked well done and it wouldn’t be an unpleasant fatty raw texture if undercooked. It will be soft yet meaty, however the skin needs to also be perfect and that means crispy!

The perfect skin needs to be well cooked which sounds like a difficult thing to achieve as the breast needs to be the opposite! This is the juxtaposed nature of the perfectly cooked duck breast, on the one hand you have soft juicy medium rare meat but on the other you have a totally well cooked and crisp skin, the fact that what’s needed to achieve these would also seem to have opposing techniques and all for the one joint?

Other cooking techniques for fried duck breast fillets

Many fried duck breast fillets recipes call for a dual heating approach which starts off in the frying pan followed by being finished in the oven. This is the quickest way but it is again all too easy to mess up.

More often than not, this technique will produce good results, but not perfect. The meat can be perfectly cooked but the skin even though golden brown and looking beautiful will tend to have just too much fat under it to have rendered down just right to be perfectly crispy. When it goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong.

No one likes over-cooked meat with fatty soft skin, or vice versa, undercooked meat with burnt skin. The disappointment when a kitchen disaster like this happens is the same as when a soufflé refuses to rise, a hollandaise sauce splits or you overcook your Christmas turkey, but there is a foolproof way of getting the perfect fried duck finish every time and it’s done just on the hob.

Ingredients and equipment

• Nice skin-on duck breasts
• A good pan, a hob
• A sharp knife to score the fat
• Something to turn the duck such as tongs
• A spoon
• Some salt, we love smoked salt but nice sea salt otherwise
• And a little bit more than half an hour

The secret method to perfectly fried duck breast fillets

It may seem quite long considering most other recipes for fried duck breast fillets will be much quicker but sometimes the easiest way isn’t the quickest.

The crispy skin comes from rendering down the fat. This is breaking the fat down into liquid which can be then poured off. This is the part that takes the extra dedicated time.

Once you have scored the skin, either in a crisscross pattern or just diagonally making sure the knife doesn’t cut the flesh, rub salt into the skin. Then place the duck breasts in a cold frying pan with no oil skin side down.

How to fry the duck

Next turn on the heat on your hob but at a very low level. You just now need to wait for 25 minutes without doing much to the breasts other than pouring out the liquified fat making sure the meat doesn’t fall out and gently applying a little pressure to the duck every now and again to ensure the skin is always in contact with the pan as well as spooning some fat over the breasts a few times to avoid the skin drying.

Lots of fat will liquefy away, but this leaves the fatty skin much thinner which is why it will go nice and crispy. The flesh side of the duck which will have remained on the top side will look almost as if it hasn’t been cooked at all bar a bit of basting, but the heat will have gone through and primed it perfectly for the last part of the process.

After the first 25 minutes, remove the ducks from the pan and pour off any remaining fat. Place the pan back on the hob but turn up the heat to a medium high. Allow the pan to get hot before putting the duck breast back in skin side down. Cook for one minute on this side and turn over. Cook the breasts now for 2 minutes skin side up then turn over one final time to finish the ducks for one more minute just to make sure the skins are golden and crisp.

Take the ducks off the heat and rest them skin side up for at least 5 minutes before slicing. (Just enough time to make the perfect duck sauce)

Duck is a sweet meat and goes very well with rich fruity sauces. At the end of cooking our duck breast the pan is hot and stuck with fragments of duck meat and fat that is full of flavour. This is the perfect host to pour in a few simple ingredients that will produce a punchy, meaty sauce sweet with orange and wine.

How to make the best wine sauce

This duck sauce is glazed to a beautiful consistency without the need for lengthy cooking.

Pour in a little red wine vinegar and orange juice into the hot pan to de-glaze. This bubbles and steams as soon as it hits the pan and allows you to scrape up every little morsel left. Once stirred around, pour in a little wine, red or white, it doesn’t really matter, it just depends on how dark you would like the sauce. Let the sauce reduce by half which will take not much more than two minutes.

Then pour in some veal/beef stock and simmer away for about 5-6 minutes. In this time the sauce reduces to a velvety consistency with which you just need to stir in some butter to glaze. By the time it takes to prepare this sauce the ducks will have had the optimum amount of time to rest.

Our perfectly cooked fried duck breast fillets are then served with a sauce made with its own juices. Simple and effective every time as well as classically excellent. Serve it with your favourite potato (we chose potato mash this time) and greens or in flatbreads with salad the choice is yours, at least you’ll always end up with the best fried duck breast fillets in town.

More delicious dinner recipes to try

Easy roasted BBQ chicken with red wine jus
Moroccan grilled butterflied leg of lamb in delicious baharat marinade