Serves 4
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 12+ hours
Degree of Difficulty: very easy
Ingredients
- 4 duck legs
- 2 tbsp salt + more as needed
- olive oil
- 28-oz can diced tomatoes
- 8-oz can tomato sauce
- ¼ - ½ tsp cayenne pepper
- ⅓ lb pasta (pappardelle or spaghetti)
- 2 oz mozzarella cheese, grated
- 4 oz Parmesan cheese, grated
- leaves of 10-12 sprigs fresh thyme
Optional
- 1 yellow onion, diced
- spices you can add to salt cure: cinnamon, cayenne, cumin, fennel, coriander
Special Equipment
How-to
For Duck Confit (prepare duck about 1 day ahead of making the sauce)
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Work salt into duck legs (add additional spices if desired). Cover and let rest in refrigerator 2 hours
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After 2 hours, wash the salt off the duck legs and pat dry. Place legs in the bowl of a slow cooker, cover with olive oil until legs are submerged. With careful arrangement, it should only take a small amount of oil to completely cover the legs. Turn slow cooker on low-medium setting and allow to cook between 160° and 200° for at least 6 hours, and up to 24 hours
Prepare Sauce & Pasta
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Pull the meat off the cooked duck legs, shredding it into small chunks
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In a preheated sauté pan, heat 1 tbsp olive oil, and add meat to briefly sear and generate browning reaction. (If desired, sauté diced yellow onion in olive oil before adding duck)
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Add diced tomatoes to the pan, stirring to combine and using a wooden spoon to scrape the bottom of the pan to avoid meat from sticking. Add tomato sauce and cayenne pepper, Lower heat and simmer for 5-6 minutes
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While the sauce is simmering, cook your pasta per package directions. Strain the pasta, but do not rinse it – this will leave the pasta “stickier” because of the starches on the outside of the pasta, so will help thicken the sauce
Assemble & Serve
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Add the cheese to the sauce and stir to combine
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Strip the leaves off sprigs of thyme and add the leaves to the sauce
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Toss pasta with sauce. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary
Adapted from Cooking For Geeks by Jeff Potter, O’Reilly