Hi All,
Crispy duck in a few (4) simple steps.

1) Get a duck, preferably dead (minus feathers and guts also helps).
Cut in half (length ways), slap halfs in a bowl.
Pour on some rice wine, add a bit of coursely chopped ginger, some peppercorns (not neccesarily coursely chopped). Spring onions are good as well. A half dozen star anise, a few sticks of cinamon.
Leave it alone for a few hours. Technically this is called "marinating", it is nearer a good excuse to drink a few beers whilst the duck supposedly "marinates"..

2) Your now supposed to steam the resultant marinaded duck, but I put them in a pan, add a little water and gently simmer for a couple of hours tops.

Really an hour should do, but if your following this "reciepe" line by line (apparently an atmospheric physicists "thing") it is now too late and your duck is boiled to death.
Well, it was dead anyway.

Remove from the pan (the duck halves obviously), and leave to drain and cool, for an hour or so.
Left the right way up the pan may take longer, there again strain out the "bits" from the pan, and you have a soup stock.

3) You can now freeze the cooked duck for later use, it will keep almost indefinately.
Just before that I'll come back and finish the reciepe off.

Oh, OK, if you don't want to freeze the duck, put a large pan with cooking oil (in the pan) on a stove (preferably yours).
Light the stove, oh that helps for stage 2 as well, if you hadn't worked that out.
Once the oil or fat (it depends on which your using) is upto a good hot temperature, gently put the duck halve in.
If you like a mottled, painful, and blistered appearance, just throw the duck in with gay abandon.

Let the duck deep fry for several minutes, untill the skin turns golden and crispy.
Do not put the pan lid on.
OK, OK, OK, so I did......
The deep seated "explosions" from the pan are quite exciting to be honest,
but the flying oil if you remove the lid is quite painful...
And can leave you rather red faced.
I used a splash protector for the second halve rather than the pan lid, take my word for it, it works far better.

4) After removing from the deep frying pan and placing on a suitable carving plater, preferably one of those ones with the little spikes on, shred the meat on the duck (carcass, live ones do tend to object, and your neighbours can get a bit "funny" with you afterwards..) with a couple of forks, reserving in a suitable (ie no holes in the bottom) plater.
A bed of lettice finely shredded appesses the eyes (and vegetarians), but to my mind the pancakes do not work without the duck...

Whilst deep frying the duck you have also put on a steamer to steam the pancakes.
(Obviously atmospheric physicists will now be tearing their hair out..)
Serve the duck with the pancakes, and another previously prepared (What do you mean I havn't mentioned that yet, are you an atmospheric physicist..) bowl of finely shredded spring onions.
Plum sauce, or Hoisin sauce are also a must for these pancakes,
that really should of been purchased earlier in the day from a supermarket.
At the same time as purchaing the sauces, it is also advisable to purchase the thin pancakes.
(Now everyone is going mad at this "reciepe"...)

The really nice thing about this for the dummy cook, is that the people you are cooking for are supposed to assemble their own pancakes, so you just put the prepared ingredients on the table,
and they do the rest.
Simple really, and as you cooked, they can wash up.
Thinking ahead on this means that there are several days of washing up to do, that you now do not have to, great.
Atmospheric physicists will not gain on the washing up,
they will have already done it for the previous days.


Gorgeous, and I hope following this "reciepe" will not leave you red faced...