I have a duck. Let us cook it.

Skoal Cat

Pretty simple here. I love duck, grabbed a whole duck on sale from the supermarket, and now its thawing in my fridge.

How should I cook it? Any tricks? I'm great with a recipe and have all the standard kitchen tools at my disposal.

bowen

Generally you try to remove most of the duck fat (ducks are super fatty) and then roast it kinda like a turkey, though you're supposed to rotate it every half hour or so.

Niceguy Myeye

I hear ducks are best when they are shoved into the hole of some other beast.

wonderpug

Season it, roast it, then fry some potatoes using the fat.

I haven't roasted a duck before, but I did roast a goose for the first time last year, and I imagine there are similarities. The high fat content makes the experience a bit different than roasting a chicken. Be sure to have the bird on a wire rack on a pan, and make sure your pan is deep enough to catch a lot of drippings. A lot of fat gets rendered out, and it can be really dangerous. I melted my basting tube trying to get some of the goose fat pool taken out of the pan.

Also: be sure to save those rendered fat drippings! Aside from frying up some delicious, delicious duck fat potatoes to go with your meal that day, you can save the rest in a jar for later delicious use.

Djeet

The high fat content means that you do risk making a lot of smoke when roasting if you don't diligently remove the rendered fat (make fries with that!). You can use a dual cooking method (e.g. simmering/steaming for primary cooking, and finishing in the pan to brown it), but you may lose a good amount of the rendered fat that way.

Also it tastes much better cooked to medium/medium rare than well done, though standard caveat about eating not fully cooked food applies. I think there's a significantly lower risk of salmonella with duck due to low demand meaning they are raised in better conditions than chickens.

Skoal Cat

I should probably get a probe thermometer.

tinwhiskers

Duck also takes glazes amazingly well. Peking Duck and Duck a L'Orange, are the 2 classic examples.

http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/09/the-food-lab-how-to-make-peking-duck-at-home.html

has a decent how to make Peking-duck at home guide.

And some of the steps, like letting it dry over night, will probably apply to any glazed version if you cook it.

Inquisitor77

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/mighty-duck-recipe/index.html

UrQuanLord88

God I love Cantonese-style roast duck.

I don't think google is a bad place to find a recipe for that