Spring Duck Prosciutto

Today at Blueacre, some friends of the chef came in, so my buddy Eric and I did a little something special.

rolled duck prosciutto, with fresh herbs, shaved pickled beets, crostinis, and parsley oil.

So the food is a lot simpler than it looks.

For the duck prosciutto, we cured a duck breast in curing salt and spices for about 3 weeks. We then popped it into the freezer for a bit so that we could use the meat slicer to get nice thin slices, which we then rolled into what you see up above.

After we had the meat all prepped out, we started the meticulous work of picking chervil off of it’s stem to make them look like miniature trees-very cool.

The product of my labor- a chervil stem

The leaves.

You see, the whole idea of the dish was to make it seem life like and “springy,” using spring colors and herbs and scattering them around the plate.

We also picked dill, tarragon, and made parsley oil.

For the beets, we took some raw yellow beets and shaved them paper thin (this way, they weren’t as hard to eat raw). After that, we just put them in some pickling liquid for 5 minutes or so to let them absorb some of the flavor.

 Beets in a sweet pickling liquid

And here comes my favorite part. After the plate was arranged, we spooned some parsley oil and vinegar into the prosciutto cones to form something kind of like a vinaigrette. We didn’t do this for flavor, but the idea was that when you picked up the prosciutto, the green would spill out onto the plate.

Thought that was awesome.

See you next time.

-Tim