My absolute favourite restaurant Chinese dish is definitely the Peking Duck. The flour pancake wrap with crispy duck skin and a bit of meat. YUM. Since I have some time on my hands this summer, I thought I would give it a try and make it at home. Read some recipes and videos online and as per my cooking style, I started eyeballing and making it my own. (Baking however is completely different where I would follow a recipe religiously!)
Didn’t care to roast a whole duck as I’m only making dinner for two. And I coincidentally have 2 frozen duck breast in the freezer. Didn’t take a lot of pictures throughout, but was pretty happy with how it turned out. Nick was happy as well when he came home from volleyball to Peking Duck dinner. Didn’t actually take too long to make. Approx 40 minutes to make the wrap and roll it out. And approx 30-45 mintues of cooking time of the duck breast. I was overly generous with the cooking time to ensure it is thoroughly cooked as I don’t even like to see pink on duck meat. Sauce and cucumber side dish took all of 5 minutes to prepare. Onto the making of my homemade Peking Duck!
The Pancake Wraps:
2 cups of flour (i used All purpose)
1/2 tsp of Salt
1 cup of boiling water
put flour and salt in a bowl, pour in hot water, and mix with a fork (or hands in my case very gingerly). Form a dough ball. Add more water if required (mine did). Cover with a damp cloth for 20 minutes to let the dough rest.
Divide the dough into little balls. I didn’t measure or weigh them. I just eye balled it. Small ball the size of a walnut perhaps? The thinner the pancake, the better it is I think. I ended up having way more dough balls than I needed. I figure 20-25 wraps was more than enough for our dinner.
Make sure there is plenty of corn starch on the surface and the rolling pin, I rolled out the dough ball as thin as I like it. Doesn’t have to be in a perfect shape as I then used a pastry circle shape cutter I had (chose the 3.5″ diameter), and cut out a perfect circle for the wrap.
Next, brush a thin layer of sesame oil on the top side of the wrap and put it on the counter. Repeat with another dough ball, and start stacking them, ensuring there is a thin coat of sesame oil in between the layers.
I stacked about 10 in each pile, ensuring the top layer does not have any sesame oil. Then lightly roll the entire stack together to make it even thinner.
Lay a parchment paper on a dish, and put these 2 stacks into a double boiler. I actually do not own a basket steamer (something I should purchase!), but it turned out just fine. Steam for about 20 minutes. Serve immediately. So if your duck isn’t ready yet, I would wait to steam it – not sure how reheating it would – may get hard and not as good.
Roasted Duck Breast
2 frozen duck breast was defrosted in the morning – so at least 5 hours prior. Then washed, and make sure it was all clean and dried. Scored the skin in a criss cross without getting into the meat.
The marinate I used was just brown sugar and 5 spice mix. Again, i didn’t really measure any of it, just eyeballed it – say half and half. though, it was a tad on the sweeter side, so maybe next time I would say a bit less sugar in the mix. Marinate for at least 20 minutes in the fridge. Doesn’t look that great at this point eh?
Now time to get cooking – place breast skin side down on a pan over medium-high heat (from a cold pan to slowly melt the fat). You want to sear and melt the fat for approx 10 minutes. I then turned it over in the pan, and lower the heat and cooked it for another 10 minutes. At this point, to be safe, I put it into the oven for another 5-10 minutes at 350F. the last few minutes, I turned the oven to broil to ensure crispy skin. Let it rest for about 15 minutes. Doesn’t this look beautiful?!
with Peking Duck wrap, you will want to slice this thinly.
Finishing Touches
Now last step for garnish, slice some cucumbers as thinly as possible into little sticks. I don’t care for the scallion, or else technically this should be part of it as well.
For the sauce I mixed in Hoisin sauce with a bit of dark soy sauce and a bit of sesame oil.
That’s it – I think it took longer to put this in a post then the actual making of it.
enjoy the deliciousness…
let me know if there are any questions!