Pre-searing Sous Vide Duck Breast vs Not Pre-searing

Anova Culinary

Pre-searing your duck can help to create a crispier skin and also prevent the duck flesh from cooking too much when finishing. The reason? By frying the duck skin while the breast is cold, less of the flesh cooks, therefore retaining more moisture and pinkness. The skin also crisps up faster when finishing if it has been pre-seared prior to cooking sous vide. This is an experiment with two duck breasts, one pre-seared, the other not.

Author

Christina Wylie

Christina Wylie is an award-winning writer, author, editor, food stylist, recipe creator, entrepreneur and radio host whose work has been featured in The Times & The Sunday Times, Time Out (Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong and Dubai), Traveler’s Digest, Fah Thai Magazine, Broadsheet, Wining & Dining and many other internationally renowned publications. In 2013, after almost a decade of working as an international journalist, Christina founded the online lifestyle magazine The GAB Magazine, for which she now leads a team of 60 writers based all across Australia. She then founded Samui Life Magazine in 2016. After working as a recipe creator for Anova Culinary for over a year, she signed a cookbook contract with the American-based, international publishing company Quarto. Her cookbook, titled The Sous Vide Kitchen: Techniques, Ideas, and More Than 100 Recipes to Cook at Home, was published worldwide in 2017. She wrote, styled, and photographed everything that you see within that book. In 2017 she opened her first restaurant, Bootlegger, in Koh Samui, Thailand. She is currently in the initial stages of launching Bootlegger 2 in Phuket in 2018, and is looking to open Bootlegger 3 in Bangkok in 2019. She is currently working towards stepping into the world of food and travel presenting. As an entrepreneur herself, Christina co-founded the charity initiative Project Gen Z in 2015 to teach orphaned Cambodian children entrepreneurial skills. A British expat born and raised in Hong Kong, Christina has worked across the globe, and has lived in Thailand, London, Hong Kong, Australia and South Africa over the years.

Prep Time: 00:00

Recipe Time: 01:00

Temperature : 134.6F / 57C

Ingredients

Directions

  1. To test this theory, we cooked two duck breasts - one that we pre-seared and another that we did not.
  2. We pre-seared the skin side of one duck breast in a dry pan for 1 minute before placing both duck breasts in bags to cook sous vide in our Anova sous vide immersion circulator for 1 hour at 57C
  3. With 20 minutes left to go on the sous vide machine, we preheated the oven to 210C
  4. When the hour of cooking sous vide was up, we took the duck breasts out of the bags and seasoned them with salt and pepper
  5. We then seared the skin side of both in a pan (the pre-seared one for 1 minute and the non-pre-seared one for 2 minutes, as it needed more time to render)
  6. We then placed them in the oven (skin side up) for 4 minutes at 210C
  7. We left the duck breasts to rest for a few minutes before slicing
  8. Upon slicing, we noticed that the pre-seared duck had crispier skin as more of the fat had been rendered, and the flesh was more pink and moist

Finishing Steps

  1. Season with salt and pepper
  2. Sear the skin in a pan (the pre-seared one for 1 minute and the non-pre-seared one for 2 minutes)
  3. Cook in oven (skin side up) for 4 minutes at 210C