Szechuan Duck skewers with Cherry and star anise sauce

Get over here and look at this Szechuan duck skewer, served pink with melted crisp, duck fat and a Fragrant cherry sauce and a blood orange salad. Good Grief its delicious!

The first of the cherries hit, my local greengrocers. They’re from Italy, tiny, but incredibly sweet and juicy. Having this greengrocer here is brilliant as I’m now creating my recipes based on what they have in that’s seasonal and new. Shout out to Bora and Son in Walthamstow village. I wanted to make a cherry sauce spiked with blood orange juice, star anise, soy, rice wine, sugar, and vinegar.

Then I’ve had this obsession to make a Northern Chinese style Lamb skewer, but with duck breast and more of a focus on Szechuan flavours. To begin with I made a rub with white pepper, black pepper, green pepper Szechuan pepper, fennel seed, cloves and dried chillies. If you’ve not had one of these skewers before you really need to. I used to get my favourites from Silk Road in Camberwell and Sichuan Grand in Stratford.

To make these I removed and salted the duck fat and thinly sliced the duck, before feeding them onto two soaked wooden skewers. You soak wooden skewers in water for an hour before you cook with them so they don’t burn. I salted them for 5 minutes and then rubbed them with the rub.

I have always fought to take cherry stones out and have meant to get one of those cherry stoners for a billion years. The reality it would spend as much time out of my utensil’s drawer as my melon baller. So, I went on a rampage of the internet to find the best alternative and simple result. Now I can confidently say I now have the best tip for knocking out cherry stones . What you do is remove the stalk, then slide a chopstick, (which is the perfect size), and literally poke out the stone. Never forget this! I’m now going to be armed with my single chopstick and try it with small apricots and greengages and I will report back. My instinct is that I will be now keeping a chopstick in my knife roll!

I place all the pitted cherries in their blood-coloured juice into a pan with the juice of the last of the blood oranges. The sauce is boiled together and then I removed the star anise before thickening the sauce with some arrowroot, but cornflour or agar also work. Then a long whizz in the Thermomix to make the smoothest and most elegant of sauces. The sauce is beautiful and only just savoury. At a time where savoury topping on ice cream like Green extra virgin olive oil and salt or chili crisp is the cool topping for ice cream, this would have a similar feel. If I’m not wrong, there was a soy sauce syrup trend with vanilla ice cream in the earl 2000’s too.

Then piled it all together with a blood orange, spring onion, cucumber, and chilli salad. This I’m not going to include in the recipe, but I basically segmented 2 blood oranges, sliced a Thai red chilli and shredded some spring onion and cucumber. I then mixed a little extra virgin olive oil with some lime juice, red wine vinegar and salt and threw in a few coriander leaves when I mixed it together. This cuts through and adds another layer to cut through the savoury and fatty duck, while adding to the classic 5 flavour profiles!

Serves 4

Prep time 1 hour

Cooking time 30 minutes

For the mixed spice

1 tbsp black peppercorns

1 tbsp white peppercorns

1 tbsp green peppercorns

2 tbsp Szechuan peppercorns

1 tsp fennel seed

1 tsp cumin seed

2 cloves

½ tsp salt

A really good whack of MSG, (optional)

For the duck

4 duck breasts

8 soaked wooden skewers or 4 metal ones

For the cherry sauce

250g cherries, stoned

75g sugar, white or brown is fine

100ml blood orange juice (classico orange is totally fine too)

200ml water

50ml red wine vinegar

2 tablespoons light or Japanese soy sauce

2 tablespoons of Chinese (Shaoshing) or Japanese (Mirin) cooking wine

1 star anise

1 tsp arrowroot, agar agar or cornflour

To make the spice mix, grind the whole spices in a pestle and mortar until “fairly” well ground, but it’s nice to have a bit of texture.

To make the duck; Remove the duck skin and salt with about ½ tsp of salt and leave for 10 minutes and then slice the duck into slivers. Meanwhile slice the duck breast into slivers. Next you need to feed the duck onto the skewer. I do 1 piece of fat to 2-3 pieces of meat. Make 4 skewers. Season the whole thing with salt and then split half of the spice mix between the skewers.

To make the cherry sauce; Simply put all the ingredients, bar the thickening agent, into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce to a gentle simmer and cook for 15 minutes or until the cherries are cooked through and the sauce has reduced. Mix a tiny bit of the sauce with the thickening agent and emulsify with the sauce. Blend the sauce – ideally in. a high-power blender – but a stick blender for a couple of minutes will do. Chill and allow3 to thicken. It should be a pouring and coating consistency.

To cook the duck, heat a BBQ until the coals are white hot and then push them to the side OR heat a griddle pan until smoking. Griddle the skewers on both sides – I put pressure on them with a weight – for about 4-5 minutes or until the duck is brown and the fat crackly. I use a pastry brush to oil the duck every so often. Remove the duck and leave to rest for 5 minutes before serving. The duck should be blushed pink inside. I do a light sprinkle with some more, but not all, of the spice after they’ve cooked.

Serve the duck with a spoon of cherry sauce and the blood orange salad.