Peking Duck with Hoisin Sauce

Hoisin sauce never tasted this good until I made it. Perhaps I just like it a little extra garlicy, also I don’t very often cook with molasses. Having made a few Chinese recipes now I’ll be using them a lot more. This is supposed to be made with black bean paste. That’s not black bean sauce, black bean paste is a paste made from fermented mung beans. I couldn’t find the stuff anywhere even though I went to some trouble looking. As it turned out miso paste, which is far more readily available, made an excellent substitute.

Ingredients
1 Red Chili
2 cloves Garlic
75ml Dark Soy Sauce
3 tbsp Molasses
4 tsp Sesame Oil
4 tsp Rice Wine Vinegar
100g Miso Paste

Crush the garlic and the chilli into a paste. Use a pestle and mortar for this. I have 2 but they’re living in boxes somewhere at the moment whilst we move so I had to try and make a paste using the back of a spoon in a bowl. There really is a reason that even with all the high tech gadgets we have in the kitchen today we still smash things between 2 stones, there’s nothing does the job quite as well.

Add the vinegar and the oil and mix into chilli and garlic, then add the miso bit by bit to mix it all up into a smooth paste.

Next add the soy sauce, again bit by bit to make a smooth sauce.

And finally carefully heat the molasses to make them pour easier and add them to make a velvety smooth and thick sauce. I say carefully heat them, if you're just going to chuck them in the microwave for a bit then be ready to clean hot sticky molasses off the inside of your microwave.

This makes the perfect dipping sauce, it’s one of the most moreish things I’ve made!

Or...

Ingredients
4 tbsp Hoisin Sauce
1 tbsp Molasses
1 tbsp Runny Honey
1 tbsp Light Soy Sauce
1 1/2 cm Fresh Ginger
1 tbsp Mirin
1/2 tsp Chinese 5 Spice

And then this duck, that I’ve prepared by removing the neck flap and blanching the skin by pouring boiling water straight from the kettle all over, then gently patting dry with paper towels.

I minced the ginger and combined all the ingredients together in a saucepan and brought to the boil, then reduced for about 2 minutes to make Peking Sauce. I brushed the duck all over, inside and out, only using half of the sauce.

Then roasted at 200degC for 45 minutes over a rack to allow the fat to drain away, re-glazed again with the remaining sauce and roasted for a further 45 minutes.

I served it with the remainder the hoisin sauce to dip the duck in at the table. Of course you could always serve this with the classic pancakes and some sliced cucumber and spring onions.