Homemade Duck Bresaola

I've been getting into homemade cured meats and preserves of late. I was inspired by a Duck Prosciutto I had tried at Bottega in the city. I found a recipe by local chef Tobie Puttock online and thought I'd give it a go myself.

The whole process is really easy and just takes patience more than anything else.
If you're planning on following this recipe, I would recommend getting the meatiest duck breasts you can find, this will maximise the amount of finished product you get and it will also minimise the salt that the meat absorbs.


The recipe doesn't mention it, but when it comes time to hang the breasts, I would rinse off the mix and dry it with a paper towel, before hanging. Again, this is to minimise the salt absorbed by the meat.

As you may have worked out, my final product was quite salty, but still very edible. I would suggest maybe keeping them in the salt mix for a shorter amount of time. Maybe 2 or 3 days. However, my Duck Breasts were quite small, so if you get larger ones, it might be worth keeping them the full 4 days in the mix.

I served mine with some Blue Cheese, Sour Cherry Conserve, Crackers and Quince Paste. Yum!

Tomato Chilli Jam

Reading through some asian menus, I noticed that quite a few of them served Tomato-Chilli Jam with fried eggs, whether it be Sunny Side up, deep fried or son-in-law eggs. So, I thought I'd give making some jam a go.

Here is a recipe I found in The Cook's Book:

Ingredients:
About 500g ripe Tomatoes
2 Knobs of ginger
3 or 4 tablespoons of Fish Sauce
4 small fresh Chillies, finely chopped
4 Garlic Cloves finely chopped
300g Caster Sugar
100ml red wine vinegar

Put half the tomatoes, the fish sauce and ginger in a blender and blend until smooth.
Place the blended tomato mixture and the rest of the ingredients into a deep pan along with the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a gentle simmer and leave for about 40 minutes, remembering to stir often.
At the end of this time, it should have reduced down to about a 1/4 and should be thick and glossy.
Pour into jars, leave to cool to room temperature, then refridgerate.
Don't strain out the tomato pips at any stage, as these are what contains most of the pectin, which thickens your jam.


The jam turned out great! However, next time I will add a couple more chillis, as it didnt quite have enough kick to it. I enjoyed mine yesterday morning spread on a nice piece of thick toast with a fried egg- sprinkled with some coriander. Wicked!!