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If you are looking for new ideas to serve for a special occasion you should make our recipe for roasted duck breast with ginger-rum sauce. Duck breast is a rich, dark meat and is often served with a sweet fruit sauce to balance out the richness of the meat. Our ginger-rum sauce pairs beautifully with this tender, juicy duck breast.

Ducks spend a lot of time in cold water. They stay insulated with a thick layer of fat just beneath the skin to keep them warm. The ducks we using in this recipe are White Peking domesticated ducks and do not have that wild, gamey taste that wild ducks will have.

If you want a wild duck I guess you will have to go hunting. My one and only experience with wild duck was that it tasted ‘fishy’ since that was their diet.

Duck breast is found on high-end restaurant menus along with high-end prices of $25 and up, per serving. But….you can create this tender, rich, delicacy in your own kitchen at a very reasonable price.

You can find whole ducks, duck breasts and duck legs in the frozen meat section of most grocery stores. We bought these two six-ounce each, individually packaged duck breast for less than $7 each and we splurged on a $15 bottle of good Syrah wine to boot!

Ginger Rum Sauce

The ginger-rum sauce is savory-sweet with a little garlic, fresh ginger, ginger preserves and a touch of golden rum. All the alcohol in the rum gets boiled out as the mixture reduces to a slightly thick syrup.

A small amount of cream added to the sauce gives it a smooth consistency. Because the ginger-rum sauce will take longer to cook than the roasted duck breast we prepared it first and kept it covered on a back burner to stay warm.

You could actually make the sauce in advance. Just refrigerate it, then do a re-heat just before the duck is ready to serve.

Preparing the duck breast:

Cooking a duck breast is not any more challenging than cooking a steak. Just to look at the uncooked underside of a duck breast it even looks like a steak. And, like a good steak, duck breast is best cooked to a rosy pink. It can be a challenge though to achieve that perfectly crisp, golden skin without over-cooking the lean breast meat.

How to get crisp skin:

The key to getting the skin nice and crisp is to first score the skin with a sharp knife so the fat is released during searing and crisps up quickly. It is surprising how much fat will bubble up and that fat has a lot of flavor.

Save the rendered fat left in the skillet and use it wherever you would use bacon drippings. The grocery stores actually sell small tubs of duck fat. It’s priceless!

After the duck breasts are brown and crispy, drain the fat off and flip the breasts over. Next, transfer the skillet to the hot, preheated oven.

We roasted the duck breasts to a medium-rare at 135°F on an instant-read thermometer. The duck breasts were transferred to a cutting board and covered with foil for a five-minute rest before slicing it and serving.

To serve these delicacies, we spooned a puddle of the ginger-rum sauce on two plates and added one sliced duck breast to each plate.

We served this roasted duck breast with fresh asparagus and red quinoa. And a glass of Syrah wine. Yum….:)

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