Frances Bissell

Roast Duck with Lavender Honey and Sesame Seeds

Preparation info

  • serves

    4

    • Difficulty

      Medium

Appears in

The Scented Kitchen: Cooking with Flowers

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

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,