Garlic Forward Chimichurri
This chimichurri was prepared with roasted duck in mind. To get the skinny on how we prepared our birds, check out Hank Shaw’s recipe here.
Chimichurri:
1 head of garlic, minced
1/2 c. olive oil
1 c. parsley, finely chopped
1 c. mint, finely chopped
1.5 c. freshly grated Parmesan, preferably Parmigiano-Reggiano
1 jalapeño or other hot chili, finely chopped
2 lemons
salt and pepper to taste
The Beta:
Sauté minced garlic in 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat, reserving the remainder of the olive oil for later. Cook until the garlic becomes aromatic and translucent, removing it from heat before it begins to brown.
After cooling for a few minutes, transfer the garlic into your preferred serving bowl and combine with the remaining olive oil, parsley, mint, grated Parmesan, and jalapeño .
Mix in the juice from one lemon, taste, and then add more as needed. This all comes down to preference, but we usually land somewhere between one and a half to two lemons.
As you taste for acidity, check your salt content as well. The Parmesan should add a nice level of saltiness, but a teaspoon of kosher salt won’t hurt. Finish everything with fresh-ground pepper, and your chimichurri is ready to serve!
Note: Buying fresh herbs from the grocery store sucks — there, I said it. Parsley is cheap, but things like mint and basil cost an arm and a leg for no reason. The big thing here is the parsley, so feel encouraged to try out whatever is convenient. If your garden has plenty of mint, lucky you! Otherwise substitute for what you have on hand. Try out other flavors like sweet basil, Thai basil, oregano, or cilantro — the garlic, Parmesan, and lemon juice are incredibly forgiving here. Also, if you’re looking for a cheap option for the O.G. Parmigiano-Reggiano, grab a block at Costco. If you don’t have access to the fancy stuff, grab whatever whole Parmesan cheese your local grocery store sells. But don’t even think about touching that green can.
The Tasty Truth About Wild Duck
How you stack up in the kitchen often depends on your ability to tolerate tedious tasks. Peeling and dicing an entire head of garlic might make a less enthusiastic cook grumble, but prepping a duck could ensure they never find a love for culinary preparation. Plucking and butchering birds takes time, but as with most all-consuming efforts in the kitchen, there’s really no substitute for doing things the right way.
When I was a kid, my brothers hunted ducks all winter break with high school buddies while I stayed home most mornings and hunted the covers. As much as I hated getting out of bed, I relished hearing the return of my brother’s old GMC pickup as the tires crunched into the driveway, hurling myself downstairs upon their arrival to see how many birds they had hauled back in the bed of the truck. We’d stand shoulder to shoulder at the tailgate, breasting out birds with pocket knives and pitching their carcasses into a waste bin. Back then, bird hunting was done for the numbers and not for the table. Honestly, cleaning the birds was the chore you tolerated in order to keep going out for more spoils of another successful morning. My mom endured the feathers in her kitchen (though she remembers this as a smudge of our hunting life) and scoured her collection of cookbooks to find recipes that would tame our wild birds. We ate things like duck gumbo that were less about the meat and more about the masking, yet still we sought to kill more and more birds. And as you can see below, my butchering and carving skills are still in the adolescent stage.
I’m older now, and less blood thirsty than before. I see wild game as a resource to be cared for and utilized rather than owned or conquered. I have no desire to kill a duck I won’t eat, and that means discovering preparations that differ from my childhood understanding. Most people will turn their nose up when you talk about wild duck because there’s a misconception that they aren’t worth eating. The issue isn’t the flavor of the meat -- it’s our ignorance in ways of preparing these delicious birds. If we only had the concept of what raw potatoes tasted like, we’d leave those suckers in the ground and Idaho would have to find a different staple crop. Since we found out about French fries, potato chips, and mashing them up with salt, butter, and cream, we can hardly get enough of them. Wild ducks are no different except that people harvest them by the thousands with no intention of actually eating them -- prepared well, they are delicious and equally as versatile as your favorite root vegetable.
I owe my enlightenment of wild game preparation to Hank Shaw and his blog. He doesn’t need a plug from a site with five readers, but if you’re ever looking for someone to walk you through wild game preparation, you deserve to know about this guy. He insists that wild ducks, apart from certain fish-feeding ducks like ring-necks, must be plucked to be fully enjoyed. The skin is where the fat and the flavor comes from -- cooking a duck breast with no skin would be akin to trimming the fat off of a ribeye before throwing it on the grill. This is the way of one who reaches for ketchup at a steak house. You don’t want to be that guy, do you? Plucking and butchering a duck is a no-joke, sit down and settle in, hours long affair depending on how successful your decoy setup and calling were. But as it goes with a lot of things in life, the harder road leads to a better final destination: in this case, a delicious plate of duck meat on the table.
You’ll find plenty of other wild duck recipes on his site, including how to prepare ring-necks, techniques for rendering fat, and ideas for all the smaller parts of a duck in order to assure you’re using the whole bird -- not to mention recipes for countless other wild food. You’ll even find a list of his favorite sauces for wild meat -- his chimichurri being the inspiration for the recipe above.
I’ve eaten plenty of bad duck meat over the years -- nothing that I found unpalatable, but definitely gamey enough to turn off a pickier eater. Going into this, I knew we needed a backup weapon of sorts, something so delicious it would win over any skeptics taste buds regardless of the outcome of the duck. After coming across Hank Shaw’s list of sauces, Tom and I landed on the chimichurri recipe -- a perfect blend of salt, garlic, acid, and fresh herbs. I prepped the ducks while Tommy chopped the garlic for the sauce, and before I knew it, he had chopped an entire head rather than the one or two cloves the recipe calls for (let’s call it a happy accident). Since we had gone overboard on the garlic, Tom decided to briefly sauté the minced head in olive oil. One diversion in the recipe led to a few others, and the end result was the perfect accompaniment for our roasted ducks. These ducks revealed to me how delicious wild game can be when prepared correctly, even when the naysayers are shaking their heads with doubt. This meal was so delicious that we followed it up with wild duck round two the following evening. We seared skin-on breasts to a medium rare and then pan fried the one ring-neck after removing the skin and dredging the breasts in flour. My confidence in these birds was so high that after another successful hunt on Thanksgiving morning, I took three birds the following day, smoked them, and then served them up with the garlic-heavy chimichurri to a table full of duck skeptics. In the end, I think we made believers out of all of them.
This is the plate of a man who knows something good when he tastes it. Ben politely asked if we would be offended if he put an entire duck on his plate after the breast meat, wings, and legs had been removed. “Quite the opposite,” I said. “That’s the best compliment we could have asked for.”