Name: Smoked Tea Duck (燻鴨)
Yield: Serves 3–4 as a main course, 5–6 as part of a multicourse meal.
Cuisine: Chinese
Ingredients: 3½–4½ pound duck, fresh-killed best (weight after removal of head, neck, feet, wingtips, tail, and oil sacs); ½ cup packed brown sugar, light or dark; 1½ teaspoons finely minced, home-dried orange or tangerine peel; 6–7 cups corn or peanut oil, for deep-frying; 3 tablespoons coarse kosher salt; 1 teaspoon finely minced fresh ginger; 2 tablespoons Szechwan brown peppercorns; 5 finger lengths home-dried orange or tangerine peel, torn into small pieces; ½ cup raw rice; ½ cup dry jasmine tea leaves; 5 tablespoons Chinese cassia bark, broken into small bits before measuring, or three 2-inch cinnamon sticks, broken into small bits

Preparation info

Serves
3–4
as a main course .

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking

By Barbara Tropp

Published 1982

About

This is an ethereal duck, traditionally smoked over jasmine tea leaves and pungent camphorwood, and here flavored by the tea in the company of more easily obtained spices. The result is a richly perfumed bird with an incredibly crisp skin, a thin layer of delicately seasoned fat, and a memorably tender flesh.

The transformation from raw duck to smoked duck involves four separate steps, each leisurely, and requiring no particular expertise. Even the deep-frying,