Roasted duck leg with Porto wine and beetroot sauce

Wanted to try duck leg for really long time, I´ve always eaten duck breast or magret, but never the leg. Wonder around how to cook it, it was for sure that oven was the only way to go, in a pan, it is really difficult to get the bone meat cooked without not burning the outer skin.

Duck meat is really intense, almost as game meat, so I thought it need a slow cooking. This dish was a bit of experiment and test for my skills, I love to experiment with new flavours or techniques, most of the times goes well but there has been times that the result is not eatable!

My idea was to give a slight marinate to the duck leg, achieve a crispy skin and a juicy interior. For the marinate I used mainly Worcester sauce, Lea & Perrins, don´t try any other brand, don´t taste not even close to the original!! The problem here in Finland is that they only sell Heinz Worcester sauce, got mine in a recent trip to Italy and was so eager to use it!

Ingredients

• Duck leg
• Lea & Perrins Worcester sauce
• Dried rosmary
• 1dl Porto wine
• Beetroot
• Onion
• Carrot
• Garlic
• Laurel
• Red pepper

Preparation

Prepare the duck leg, don´t trim too much the fat, we want a bit for the cooking proces. With a sharp knife, make some small holes, pinching, in the duck skin. Place the duck leg in a tray and add salt and pepper and rosmary for both sides, add two table spoons of Worcester sauce making sure the whole meat is soaked in the sauce. Let it rest in the fridge for two hours.

Chop the vegetables in fairly big pieces but the beetroot, otherwise it will be raw. Peel the garlic and with a big knife, press till it breaks.

In the same tray where you had the duck marinating, add the vegetables, a laurel leaf, 1dl of port wine and same amount of water and put it straight to oven at 180C for 30 min.
 

After the 30 min take it out, and with the help of a spoon, mix the vegetables and use the sauce of the tray to get the duck moisture by dropping some sauce on top. Put it back to oven for 15 min more. and repeat the operation.

The duck leg it need 1h 15min to be ready but depend on how thick is it, so an hour would be a pretty standard time.

With the roasted vegetables we are gonna make a thick sauce. For that we will place most of them in a blender with almost all the "juice" of the tray and making sure the laurel is not there. We will get a sort of mashed potato texture.

Now there is nothing but serving it! put a bit of the sauce next to the vegetables and the duck leg, and pour the little bit of the "juice" remaining in top of the duck leg.

Hope you like it!!

By the way, you can see the last pictures the duck has changed a bit, the thing was when the duck was ready and almost going to serve it, we had a kind of emergency that make me postpone it for next day. Then I had to reheat the duck leg in the oven and that's why the colour changes a bit!