Chicken Fried Duck Recipe - Country Fried Duck Recipe (2024)

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This recipe is a confluence of happenstance.

I’ve been cooking a lot of Southern food lately, and in that exploration finally developed recipes for chicken fried steak and red-eye gravy that I actually liked. Straight-up red-eye gravy — ham drippings and coffee — is just not to my liking, and many chicken fried steak recipes are heavy on batter with tough meat inside.

At the same time, Holly got a chance to hunt in Great Salt Lake as an invitee on the Beretta Torture Tour, where they are field testing a new shotgun in harsh conditions. If you’ve ever hunted Salt Lake in winter, you know late season is cold, — and that it’s all teal, all the time.

And, well, those teal like to eat brine shrimp. Remember Sea Monkeys? The things you got in the mail and added water to make them come to life? Yeah, those are brine shrimp. That meant the fat from these little ducks may well be briny.

So I thought I might skin them and use the breasts to make chicken fried duck.

To go with my chicken fried duck, I already had some sour corn going in the pantry. Sour corn? Yep. Think sauerkraut, only with sweet corn kernels. Damn good. Sour, salty but still a bit sweet, they taste like corn salsa.

I also added some roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon, because bacon.

The combination, along with my take on red-eye gravy, was fantastic. Tender teal with a crispy crust, earthy-smoky-roasty Brussels sprouts, sweet-sour-salty corn, and that zing you get from a coffee-based gravy. Holly and I ate the breasts from four teal in a flash.

Any meat will work here. Obviously this is intended to be chicken fried duck, but it could be chicken fried anything. It needs to be pounded thin and tenderized. You don’t want to have to use a knife here.

While not strictly necessary, whacking the pounded cutlets with a jaccard is a great way to make them even more tender. A jaccard is a hand-held device with lots of blades in it that you hit against the meat to lacerate it all over. You can buy a jaccard onlinehere.

If you want to make sour corn, the best way to do it requires a kitchen scale. Weigh your corn and the water you plan on submerging it in, then dissolve 2 percent of that weight in kosher salt in the water. Submerge the corn in that and leave it for a week before eating. It will keep, in a cool place or the fridge, for months that way.

As for the Brussels sprouts, I used my friend Michelle Tam’s recipe here.