Applesauce Duck Gravy (Wild Ducks)


Season plucked ducks with salt, red pepper, garlic powder, onion powder. You could do the same with duck breasts.

Brown well on each side on stove in using a thin layer of oil. You want it to have a nice brown outside. You can use a small amount of kitchen bouquet if you choose. I do it both ways, with and without kitchen bouquet—-both are excellent.

You can brown sausage at the same time if you wish, or you can put a piece of smoked sausage inside of each duck, or you can add pieces of smoked sausage later before baking.

Remove ducks, add a splash of water and scrape the bottom of the pot (becomes part of gravy).

Add chopped onions and wilt them. Once onions are wilted, add a tablespoon of applesauce per small duck (teal). A little more if the ducks are large.

Add ducks and pile onions and sauce on ducks. Add a little chicken broth OR water if needed. Add a little smoked sausage and/Tasso, if needed.

Cover Bake at 350-400 until done. Check it during cooking and baste ducks with gravy.

Serve over rice. Delicious. The cayenne pepper and applesauce go together perfectly.

Enjoy!
Jeff

Sounds like some good recipes, except the ones were you eat the plank. When you eat duck you know you are eating wild, you can't make it taste like chicken. That's fine with me.

All look good.For me a crock pot really helps.

I have ate a lot of wild duck and goose and only ever had domestic duck once. It was in a small town out of Mont-de-Marsan. It was very good and what I saw of it the French eat more domestic duck than we do here.

MJM..... funny thing I was in Mont de Marsan two days ago. Yes, we eat a lot of ducks here but most are fattened ducks to make foie gras, the corn fed livers. They sell the breasts and legs separately for making duck confit.

The air base there is still active. I saw a couple of Rafales, the best fighter jet the French have. It's a serious tool.

Pete

I worked on the base for it seems like 69 days in support of Kosovo. We had KC-135's there. A air re-fueler. They had been there close to a month when I got there. It was a good TDY.

I had a bad experience with duck once. My mother and I had taken a tour of Europe in about 1981. Part of our vacation package was meals. In Paris they took our tour group to a restaurant one night. Typical 3 choices for entrees , beef , fish , poultry. I chose the poultry , in that case , duck. Our meals arrived and we all started eating.

I was eating the duck and after a bit chewed down on something hard. I thought it was a bone. As I pulled it out of my mouth I found out it was a metal brad about ¾" long. It was blackened and rusty due to age. Found about 5-6 more in the bird and the flesh around them was rust stained. Another person at our table found a couple too. We informed the waitstaff who immediately wanted to replace our selections with another entree of our choice but I kinda lost my appetite after that.

Odd thing was these brads were in the meat/flesh of the duck so it wasn't something they ate that went into their digestive tract. Only thing I could think of was someone had shot at these ducks with hand loaded shotgun rounds loaded with brads and they survived. I don't know if the ducks were wild harvested or farmed.

Boil them in gasoline. Fowl!

Try my recipe. People were just about licking the bowls. It gets rid of the strong game flavor. Using Apple for ducks is a well known trick. However, it takes a long time to really cook down apples to the point of doing what apple sauce does almost immediately.



Also worth noting, I bleed my ducks for several days. I put them in a tea pitcher of water in the refrigerator. Each day I change the water.

It’s a delicious way to eat ducks