Amarone Braised Duck with Cherries and Sichuan Pepper | Brasato d'Anatra all'Amarone con Ciliegie e Pepe di Sichuan
This braise turns on one bottle and one spice, and both catch cooks out. Amarone della Valpolicella is made from grapes dried on racks until they have lost a third of their water, so it reaches the pan with unfermented sugar and sixteen degrees of alcohol behind it. Reduce it like an ordinary red and it becomes a glaze.
The Sichuan pepper is the other variable. It is not a pepper and carries no capsaicin, so the tingling it leaves on the lip has nothing to do with heat. That tingle is fragile, and an hour in a covered pot destroys it, which is why it goes in at the very end here.
Between the two sits the duck, and the cherries hold the plate upright. They go in twice, once early for their flesh and once at the end for their acidity, and without that second addition the sauce reads sweet. The rest is ordinary: render, brown, soffritto, wine, stock, low oven, rest.
Yield: 4 servings. Prep: 40 minutes. Render and brown: 30 minutes. Braise: 1 hour 45 minutes. Finish and rest: 25 minutes. Difficulty: advanced. Course: secondo. Region: Veneto, the Valpolicella hills and the Verona plain.
The Story
Amarone comes from a strip of hills north of Verona where Corvina, Corvinone and Rondinella are picked and then not pressed. The bunches go onto racks in drying lofts called fruttai from November into January, losing water and concentrating everything else. Its famous accident is documented: a cask of Recioto, the sweet wine those grapes were meant to become, was forgotten long enough to ferment dry, and the result was named amarone, the big bitter one. The drying is what the wine is, and why it behaves as it does in a pan.
Duck belongs to the Veneto plain rather than the hills. The lowland between Verona and the lagoon was drained country laced with canals, and the great estates kept valli da pesca, walled fishing and hunting lagoons where wild duck was taken every autumn. Anara, in dialect, appears across the region in ways that have nothing to do with roasting: the broth for bigoli, the ragu, the paparele e figadini. A braise fits that landscape, because those birds were wild and lean where farmed duck is fat.
The cherries have their own geography. Marostica, above Vicenza, has grown them since the fifteenth century and protects them today, and Vignola sits beyond the regional border with its own long claim. Cherry and duck needs no defence. The Sichuan pepper does. It is the dried husk of a small citrus fruit from the Sichuan basin, in Italian kitchens only thirty years. This is contemporary cooking with an ingredient that is not Italian, and no reason to pretend otherwise.
Ingredients
For the duck
Whole duck, about 5 lb (2.3 kg), jointed into 2 legs, 2 breasts and the carcass
Fine sea salt, 2 tsp (12 g)
Freshly ground black pepper, 1/2 tsp (1 g)
For the braise
Amarone della Valpolicella, 3 cups (720 ml)
Duck or brown chicken stock, 2 cups (480 ml)
Yellow onion, finely diced, 1 medium, 5 oz (140 g)
Carrot, finely diced, 1 medium, 3 oz (85 g)
Celery stalk, finely diced, 1, 2 oz (55 g)
Garlic cloves, crushed, 3
Bay leaves, 2
Fresh thyme sprigs, 4
Cinnamon stick, small, 1
Tomato paste, 1 tbsp (16 g)
For the cherries
Fresh dark cherries, pitted, 2 cups, 10 oz (285 g), divided into two equal lots
Red wine vinegar, 2 tbsp (30 ml)
For finishing
Sichuan peppercorns, 2 tsp (4 g)
Unsalted butter, cold, 1 tbsp (14 g)
Flaky sea salt, to taste
Preparation
Step 1
Joint the duck and salt it. Break the bird into two legs and two breasts and keep the carcass. Score the breast skin in a close lattice, cutting the fat but stopping at the flesh, and prick the leg skin all over. Salt both sides, grind on the pepper, and leave it uncovered on a rack in the refrigerator for 4 hours or overnight. Dry skin is what lets the fat underneath escape.
Step 2
Render the skin slowly. Set the pieces skin side down in a cold heavy casserole with no oil and bring the heat up gradually to medium low. Fat will run within minutes and keep running for fifteen to twenty. Ladle it off as it collects and keep it. Do not raise the heat: fat that has not left the skin before the braise begins never leaves at all.
Step 3
Brown the flesh and pour the fat away. When the skin is deep gold and little is left to render, turn the pieces and give the flesh side 3 or 4 minutes, then lift them onto a tray. Pour off all but about 2 tablespoons of fat and wipe the rim. A duck this size gives up well over a cup, and whatever stays behind floats on the sauce and defeats the vinegar and cherries.
Step 4
Build the soffritto. Cook the onion, carrot and celery in the reserved fat over medium heat with a pinch of salt for 10 to 12 minutes, until soft and just colouring. Add the garlic, bay, thyme and cinnamon for 1 minute. Stir in the tomato paste and let it darken for 2 minutes, until brick coloured rather than red, because raw paste stays sharp through a long braise.
Step 5
Reduce the Amarone and watch the sugar. Pour in the wine, simmer, and scrape the base clean. Reduce by roughly half over medium heat, 12 to 15 minutes, tasting as it goes. The residual sugar concentrates faster than the acid, so stop while the liquid still tastes of fruit and tannin and not of syrup. Add no sugar, honey or balsamic after this.
Step 6
Braise low and covered, and take the breast out first. Add the stock, the carcass and the first lot of cherries, and return the legs skin side up so the skin sits clear of the liquid. Bring to a bare simmer, cover, and put it into a 300°F (150°C) oven. Give the legs 1 hour, slide the breasts in alongside and cook 25 minutes more. Lift the breasts out at 135°F (57°C) internal, because they go grey if they stay. The legs need 20 minutes longer.
Step 7
Degrease cold, reduce, finish with the pepper. Strain the liquid into a tall narrow container, discard the carcass and aromatics, and chill it until the fat sets into a cap you can lift off whole; twenty minutes in the freezer is enough. Reduce the clear liquid in a wide pan until it coats a spoon, then add the second lot of cherries and the vinegar and simmer 3 minutes. Toast the Sichuan peppercorns in a dry pan for about 60 seconds, until they smell of grapefruit peel, and grind them. Swirl in the cold butter off the heat and warm the duck through.
Plating
Rest the breasts loosely covered for 10 minutes and the legs for 5, then carve. Slice each breast across the grain into five or six pieces on a slight angle and leave the legs whole. Warm the plates properly, because this sauce is thick with gelatin from the carcass and stiffens visibly on a cold surface.
Spoon the sauce and cherries down first and set the duck on top, skin upward, so nothing wet touches the skin. Grind the toasted Sichuan pepper over the meat at the last moment and add a few flakes of salt. Polenta, soft or grilled, is the right companion in the Veneto; braised radicchio di Treviso is the other.
Professional Technique
Everything technical here follows from one fact about Amarone: it is not a dry red behaving strangely, it is a wine made from raisins. The grapes lose about a third of their weight on the drying racks before fermentation starts, concentrating sugar past the point the yeast can finish, so the bottle arrives with roughly four to eight grams of residual sugar per litre and sixteen degrees of alcohol or more. Neither figure matters in a glass. Both matter enormously in a reducing pan, because sugar concentrates on a steeper curve than acid and the alcohol carries a sweet impression of its own before it boils off.
So you reduce this wine by half rather than by two thirds, and taste at every stage instead of watching the clock. The correction is acid, never more heat: the second lot of cherries and the two tablespoons of vinegar pull the sauce back from sweetness once the reduction has done its work. Sugar in any form is the mistake. Honey, balsamic or a spoonful of jam pushes a sauce already carrying the concentrate of dried grapes into dessert.
The Sichuan pepper works on the opposite principle. It is not a peppercorn but the dried husk of the fruit of Zanthoxylum, a citrus relative, and it contains neither capsaicin nor piperine. What it contains is hydroxy alpha sanshool, which acts on the touch receptors of the lip and tongue and produces a buzzing tingle rather than heat. Sanshool is volatile and unstable to heat, so a husk that spends two hours in a covered pot gives a faint woody bitterness and no tingle. That is why it is toasted, ground at the last second, and added at the end or over the plate. With the bay leaves it is wasted.
Texture and Moisture Control
Two textures have to be managed in one pot. The legs are worked muscle full of collagen and need to sit above about 160°F (70°C) for well over an hour so that collagen hydrolyses into gelatin and the meat loosens from the bone; that gelatin also gives the sauce its gloss and body, with no flour and no cream. The breasts are the opposite: lean, fine grained, behaving like red meat, so they come out at 135°F (57°C) and rest. Cooking them until the legs are ready leaves them dry and livery.
Moisture control here is mostly fat control, and both chances come early. The slow render takes the subcutaneous fat out through scored skin before any liquid enters the pot; the cold degreasing takes out what dissolved into the braise. Skimming warm liquid with a ladle leaves a surprising amount behind, while chilling it and lifting the set cap off whole removes essentially all of it: the difference between a sauce that coats a spoon and one that beads. Keep the leg skin above the liquid line, and give it 3 minutes under a hot broiler at the end if you want it crisp.
Professional Mise en Place
The duck is salted a day ahead and the braise is unattended, so the real work is the finish, in about ten minutes.
Equipment and tools
Heavy lidded casserole wide enough for one layer
Boning knife and heavy chef knife
Instant read thermometer
Fine mesh sieve and a tall container for degreasing
Small dry pan and a spice grinder or mortar
Prepared ahead
Duck jointed, scored and salted on a rack, up to 1 day ahead
Soffritto diced and held covered, on the day
Cherries pitted and divided into two equal lots
Braise cooked, strained and chilled, up to 2 days ahead
Rendered duck fat strained into a jar and refrigerated
Service setup
Strained braising liquid degreased and ready to reduce
Second lot of cherries and the vinegar within reach
Sichuan peppercorns toasted but not yet ground
Cold butter cubed, plates warming, flaky salt open
Polenta or radicchio finished before the sauce is reheated
Chef Tips
Buy the youngest and least oaked Amarone you can find rather than a Riserva. A long aged bottle spends its money on complexity that boils off in ten minutes, and an oaked one turns resinous in reduction. If price is the obstacle, Valpolicella Ripasso is the honest substitute.
Taste the Sichuan peppercorns first. They lose their tingle on the shelf, and a batch over a year old can be almost inert while still smelling of citrus. Chew one husk: if your lip does not buzz within twenty seconds, buy new ones, and buy reddish husks rather than black seeds, which are gritty and only bitter.
Use sour or morello cherries if you can find them, fresh or frozen, and cut the vinegar to one tablespoon if you do. Sweet dark cherries are what the quantities assume, but the sour ones do the acid work themselves. Cherries in syrup are the one form to avoid.
Do the braise the day before. The flavours settle, and the fat sets overnight into a disc that lifts out in one piece rather than greasy fragments.
Common Mistakes
Leaving the duck fat in the pot. A whole duck releases more than a cup, it emulsifies into the braise and then floats on it, blunting the vinegar and coating the mouth. Pour off all but two tablespoons before the soffritto and degrease the liquid cold.
Reducing the Amarone too far. Past half volume the residual sugar from the dried grapes concentrates into a syrup and the dish tips permanently sweet. Stop at half, taste, and correct with cherries and vinegar rather than more heat.
Adding anything sweet to the sauce. Honey, sugar, balsamic and cherry jam get added by cooks who decide the sauce is flat. It is not flat, it is unbalanced, and what it needs is acid.
Cooking the breasts with the legs from the start. The legs need well over ninety minutes to break their collagen down and the breasts are finished in twenty five. Put the breasts in late, pull them at 135°F (57°C) and rest them.
Putting the Sichuan pepper in at the beginning. The molecule that produces the tingle is volatile and does not survive a long wet braise. Husks added with the bay leaves give a dull woody note.
Wine Pairing
Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG: The wine in the pot, and the obvious answer if you will pour from the same bottle. Sixteen degrees of alcohol and the glycerol weight of dried grape fruit stand up to the gelatin in the sauce, while the dried cherry and bitter almond of appassimento meet the fruit on the plate. Serve it no warmer than 64°F (18°C).
Valpolicella Classico DOC: The same grapes from the same hills without the drying, and for many cooks the better match. Corvina gives sour cherry fruit and a firm acid line at thirteen degrees rather than sixteen, so it cuts the richness of the braise instead of piling onto it. Serve it around 59°F (15°C); this is what the growers drink with duck.
Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso Friuli DOC: A north eastern red built for this plate. Its tannin is dry and grippy, its acidity high, and its dark plum fruit carries a savoury bitter edge that keeps the reduction in check. The structure meets the leg meat while the acidity handles the vinegar.
Alto Adige DOC Lagrein: Deeply coloured, firmly tannic, more mountain than Mediterranean, with dark cherry fruit and a bitter chocolate finish. That bitterness answers the toasted Sichuan husk and the cinnamon rather than the fruit, while the tannin scours whatever fat survived the degreasing. Choose a plain bottling over an oaked Riserva.
Aglianico del Vulture Superiore DOCG: The southern option, for anyone who wants more tannin than the Veneto offers. Aglianico ripens late on volcanic soil and keeps a formidable acid and tannin frame under ripe black fruit, and both work against a braise this rich.
Storage & Reheating
This dish improves overnight. Keep the meat and the strained braising liquid in separate covered containers in the refrigerator for up to 3 days. Storing them apart matters: the fat sets on the liquid where you can lift it off, while meat left in cold sauce absorbs it and goes woolly.
To reheat, warm the sauce in a wide pan until it loosens, slide the duck in, cover, and bring it up over low heat for 8 to 10 minutes, turning once. Never let it boil. For crisp leg skin, dry it and give it 3 minutes under a hot broiler, then plate it rather than returning it to the sauce. Sliced breast is best not reheated: bring it to room temperature and spoon hot sauce over.
The braise freezes for up to 3 months with the legs in the liquid and leg meat is unaffected. Do not freeze the breast, which loses its grain. Add the second lot of cherries, the vinegar and the Sichuan pepper only after thawing, since none survives freezing usefully.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 4 servings:
Calories: 690 kcal
Total Fat: 38 g
Saturated Fat: 12 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 24 g
Cholesterol: 185 mg
Sodium: 690 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 24 g
Fiber: 3 g
Total Sugars: 17 g
Added Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 48 g
Lactose: 0.1 g
Principal micronutrients: iron, zinc, selenium, niacin, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, potassium, vitamin C from the cherries
These are estimates. The fat total assumes the skin is eaten and that the render and the cold degreasing were both done properly; leaving the braising fat in would raise it by half again. Most of the alcohol cooks off and no sugar is added.
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