Duck Tender Cutlet and Arancini 鴨ささみのカツレツ

Looking ahead to the up coming Easter dinner my wife ordered a bone-in forequarter lamb roast from D’Artagnan.  She also ordered lamb tenderloins (which we’ve had before) and something we have never had before but which she wanted to try; duck tenders. They came as a fairly large quantity frozen in a single package (picture #4). I was intrigued by a french recipe which I saw in D’Artagnan website entitled “Yakitori de canard” 鴨ささみの焼き鳥. It was in french and although I did not look at it my wife assured me she could probably translate it if I wanted to try it. Nonetheless I can easily imagine this would be made exactly like chicken tender yakitori. (Hence no translation necessary.) But that is beside the point because I also wanted to make “arancini” for this meal. So it was “cutlet de canard” on the menu instead. In the picture #1, the top are arancini cut in half showing melted mozzarella cheese and the bottom shows the duck tender cutlet.

The duck tender is dark meat as opposed to chicken tender (picture #2) and has much more flavor.

The arancini was made of leftover shiitake mushroom risotto.

There is nothing special about making duck tender cutlet. After semi-thawing this is the amount we had (picture #4). They were frozen in a big one mass. I had to separate each tenders and vacuum packed 5-6 tenders per bag. I left one package for immediate consumption. Initially I was thinking of marinating the tenders before cooking but taking my wife’s suggestion that since we have never had them before we should taste them as is without any flavoring that might mask the original flavor. I opted to just lightly salt and pepper then breading them and cooking them the same as any other type of cutlet.

I was afraid of the duck tender to become dry after cooking but that was not the case and had much more flavor than chicken tender. I will definitely try to make “Yakitori de canard” next.