Roast Duck Gravy with Orange

Duck renders an enormous amount of fat and produces a small amount of intensely flavoured juice underneath it, which makes for a very different job to a chicken. The orange is not there for a retro joke, it is there because duck is fatty and needs cutting. Keep this one thin and glossy rather than thick and floury.

Ingredients

Makes about 350ml, poured sparingly over four plates

• 1 orange, zest in strips and juice
• 1 tbsp caster sugar
• 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 100ml (3 1/2fl oz) red wine or port
• 450ml (16fl oz) hot duck or chicken stock made from the duck neck and wing tips if you have them
• 2 tsp cornflour slaked in 1 tbsp cold water
• 10g cold butter optional, for gloss
• salt and black pepper

Kit

• Roasting tin
• Small heavy saucepan
• Fine sieve
• Zester

Method

1. Rest the duck on a rack over a plate so the skin stays crisp all round. Pour everything from the roasting tin into a jug and leave it two minutes. The fat layer will be thick and clear gold, and the layer beneath it will be dark and small. You want that dark layer, all of it, and none of the fat.

2. Save the duck fat in a jar. It is the best roast potato fat there is and there will be far more than you expect, often 200ml or more from a single bird.

3. Put the sugar in a small heavy pan with a teaspoon of water and cook over a medium heat, without stirring, until it turns a dark amber caramel. Swirl the pan rather than stirring it and watch it closely, since it goes from amber to burnt in about ten seconds.

4. Stand back and pour in the vinegar. It will spit and the caramel will seize solid. Keep it on the heat and stir until the lumps dissolve back into a dark syrup, which takes about a minute.

5. Add the wine and the orange zest strips, bring to the boil and reduce by half. Then pour in the stock and the reserved dark duck juices and simmer for ten minutes.

6. Deglaze the roasting tin properly. Put it on the hob with a ladle of the simmering liquid, scrape everything loose and tip it back into the pan.

7. Add the orange juice and taste. It should be sharp, sweet and savoury all at once. Adjust with a few drops more vinegar if it is too sweet, or a pinch of sugar if the orange was very sour.

8. Trickle in the slaked cornflour while whisking, and simmer for two minutes until it just coats a spoon. Strain through a fine sieve, whisk in the cold butter off the heat if you want extra shine, then season.

Tips worth knowing

• Do not use flour and duck fat as a roux here. Duck fat makes a heavy roux and the gravy ends up cloying, which is why this one uses cornflour at the end instead.
• Blood oranges or Seville oranges in season make a far better version than a supermarket navel. If you only have sweet oranges, add extra vinegar.
• Score and salt the duck skin before roasting. More rendered fat means a cleaner, more concentrated layer of juice underneath to build the gravy on.
• Taste for balance before you thicken. Once the cornflour is in it is harder to judge because the texture masks the acidity.

Keeping and reheating

Keeps three days covered in the fridge. Freezing is fine but the cornflour can go slightly grainy, so if you plan to freeze it, thicken after defrosting instead. Reheat gently and never boil hard once the butter is in.

Questions people ask