We've decided that this dish is just plain boring. But here's how to do it anyway.

Maigret (or magret) de canard is a relatively new dish: simply grilled duck breast. You'd think there's nothing more to it than grilling a steak, but there's one issue: the skin is still attached, and ducks have lots of subcutaneous fat. How should it be done? I'm still working on it. My current method:

• Cut slits in the fat side down to the flesh, about 1 cm apart.

• Place the breast fat side up in a convection oven at 180° and cook for 5 minutes. The flesh will become firmer, but will still look pretty much the same colour.

• Fry with the fat side down in a dry non-stick frying pan for 3 to 5 minutes, until most of the fat has melted. The skin should be crispy.

That's all there is to it; the rest is history.

Previous attempts

Previously I did things differently. On 10 September 2007 I did:

• Grill the duck with the skin side down on very low flame (maybe even fry in a pan) for about 8 minutes to melt the fat.

• Then grill the meat side on a relatively high flame for about two minutes.

The results were acceptable, but I think I could have done the fat side even longer:

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I made a note for the next time to give it 10 minutes on the fat side, after first scoring it, then 3 minutes on the flesh side, but it didn't work out like that. The next time I decided to follow a suggestion in “Connaître la cuisine du sud-ouest” by Francine Claustres, in which she suggests baking for 10 minutes and then grilling for another 5 to brown the skin. This isn't optimal: the duck was cooked through, and I decided that 5 minutes baking and 5 minutes grill would be better. That, on the other hand, was too little, as I discovered the time after that. Here's my best guess for the next attempt:

• Cook for 7 minutes in a convection oven at 180°.

• Fry fat side for two minutes in a frying pan.

It seems that I never did it this way.

Magret or Maigret?

This dish is almost universally called magret de canard, but an interesting comment in “Connaître la cuisine du sud-ouest” was that the correct French word is maigret, not magret. The latter is Gascon, so the correct description is either “maigret de canard” (French) or “magret de guit” (Gascon).