Warm Asian duck salad with Caramelised oranges
June 29, 2012 in Uncategorized
Up until a few years ago, I wasn’t a fan of cooking with fruit. I would even turn my nose up at a simple fruit salad. I was under the impression that fruit was only good for one thing, eating them as is. How very wrong I was.
When adding (the right) fruits to savoury dishes, you add flavours that just can’t be mimicked by other ingredients. Subtle sweetness and slight tartness (in some cases) are just two of the flavours that can’t be achieved by using an alternative. Think of when you add a squeeze of lemon juice to garlicky mushrooms. Nothing else can give you the zesty ‘lift’ that lemons give, especially to creamy or rich dishes.
With this salad I wanted to make a salad that could be eaten as a meal, on its own but still wanted to keep it simple, keeping the oranges and the duck as the main focus. I wanted to showcase the orange in a few different ways and thus I used its juice to deglaze the pan and in the dressing and caramelised a few segments to serve on top of the Asian salad leaves with the duck meat.
The dressing is simple and fragrant and gives the perfect amount of acidic-saltiness to balance out the sweet oranges and rich duck breasts.
