Pan fried Duck Breast

Duck meat is one of my favourite meats due to its richness in taste. It takes very little effort to make it tastes good. A well cooked duck should have crispy skin, moist within the meat. The best way of archiving that within a short span of time will be pan frying it.

The duck breast is lightly seasoned with salt, pepper and little bit of olive oil. It is then fried it in a pan the skin side down:


The heat should be not to high, as we want the fat between the skin and meat to be dissolved into oil. As you can see the picture above, the pan is full of oil from the dissolved duck fat.

While the duck is cooking, boils some water in a pot and add some new potatoes into it.


Once the duck breast is cooked, put it into grill with the skin side up. Grill it for a while. In the mean time, cut the cooked potatoes and fry them in the duck fat:


The potatoes will absorb all the flavour of the duck fat, and make them very crispy. Oh ya, while you are frying your potatoes, make sure to take a look at the duck breast in the grill too. The skin gets burned quickly in the grill.

Here is how it looks like in the end:

Simplified Fa Teow Kai

It has been a while since the last post. Apart from being lazy to write, I have not been experimenting much lately, just the usual pan fried steak with salads. So, there have not been any interesting stuffs to blog about.

Anyway, I learnt this recipe from Shawn when I was at his place (many many months ago). The dish is very simple to make and tastes quite good. Anyway, here are the the ingredients:


Left to right: spring onion, caramelized soya sauce (this is important), light soya sauce, Shao Hsing Wine, chicken thighs.
middle part: dried chillies, peppercorns, bunga cengkeh, garlic, ginger and mushroom.

I took the liberty of modifying Shawn's recipe by adding some mushrooms, and bunga cengkeh. Why I did that? well, I couldn't remember it too.. probably because I had those ingredients in my cupboard kuar...

Next, heat up a pot with some oil. Saute the dried chillies, peppercorns, bunga cengkeh, garlic, and ginger for a while. Add the chicken thighs in, stir fry for a minute. Cover the chicken with enough caramelized soya sauce, light soya sauce and Shao Hsing wine. Add the chopped spring onion on top, and cover the top with a lid.


This dish has to be cooked in a very low heat for a long period of time ( ~2 hours). Oh ya, stir it occasionally . Don't try to switch to high heat to speed thing up, you will burnt it. Here is mine look like after I waited for two hours:


For those in Malaysia, you can avoid this by taking 2 hours drive to Seri Kembangan to have it there... you lucky fellas :)