Name: Roast Duck with Lavender Honey and Sesame Seeds
Yield: serves 4
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon lime juice or rice vinegar; 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil; 2 tablespoons sesame seeds; 2–3 tablespoons lavender honey, melted to liquid; 2 tablespoons soy sauce; 1 lime, cut in half; a duckling weighing about 2 kg/4 lb

Preparation info

serves
4

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Scented Kitchen

By Frances Bissell

Published 2012

About

When I first cooked at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong, I ate many magnificent dishes prepared by the chef Jurg Muensch. One of them was pigeon caramelised with lavender honey. I adapted the recipe to duck, which takes very well to this fragrant herb.

Ingredients

a duckling weighing about 2 kg/4 lb
1 lime, cut in half

Main course

Method

First, make the ‘lavender honey’. You can, of course, buy lavender honey, which is a mono-floral honey produced by bees that have fed only on the nectar of lavender flowers. Spain, France, Italy and Croatia all produce excellent lavender honey, but it can be difficult to come by and anyway it does not always have a distinctive lavender scent or flavour.

To make your own lavender honey,