What’s the difference between Peking and Cantonese roast duck?
What’s the difference between a duck?If you’re not old enough to remember this once popular anti-joke joke, there were two answers. Both involved nonsensical grammatical errors with plurals; either “because one leg is both the same” or “the higher they fly, the fewer.” Yeah, it doesn’t make any more sense now than it ever did… but the question remains. What is the difference between a duck? Specifically – what’s the difference between a Peking and a Cantonese roast duck? Let’s delve!
Peking duck (kao ya, 烤鸭) is an imperial dish from Beijing, thought to date from the 14th century. The first restaurant to specialise in Peking duck, Bianyifang, was established around 600 years ago and you can still visit one of its 10 branches in China’s capital today – Quanjude is another venerable chain of duck restaurants there.
The dish is made using the American Pekin duck. The birds free-range for the first 45 days of their lives, are force-fed four times a day for the next 20 or so days (an uncomfortable truth, we know), then they’re slaughtered when fattened to 5-7kg. Once gutted (through a cut under a wing to make sure the skin is kept relatively intact), air is pumped under the skin though the neck to separate the skin from the fat; the ducks are then blanched in boiling water and hung to dry, coated in a maltose-based, five-spice flavoured glaze before further drying and roasting. There’s no marinade, and this is to keep the ducky flavours pure.
There are two ways to roast Peking duck– in either an open or closed oven. Closed ovens are brick, heated using sorghum straw and the duck is placed in after the fire burns out, cooking via convection. An open-style oven is fuelled by fruit wood (commonly peach or pear), and multiple ducks hang on loose hooks above the fire, roasting at a high temperature for about 30 minutes. The fat melts during cooking, rendering the burnished skin particularly crisp; the chef will move the ducks around in the oven to regulate the cooking and if you’ve seen a duck expert in action, you’ll know what a skill this is. It’s like they can ‘read’ the roasting bird.
To serve, the duck is deftly carved at the table, involving around 108 even, half-moon cuts. Slices of the thin, shatter-crisp skin are offered first with sugar and sweet bean sauce for dipping, then the flesh is sliced and eaten wrapped in soft, steamed wheat flour pancakes along with fine shreds of cucumber or spring onion, plus a smear of sweet bean sauce. The carcass is simmered into a delicious, light soup with cabbage or winter melon, then served after the meat course (chefs use a previous diner’s duck carcass to make this). Or, it’s wrapped up and taken home by the diner. Carving the duck is a specialised skill taking years of training to master and specialised duck restaurants in China feature up to 200 duck dishes on the menu, using every imaginable part of the bird. Including gizzards, tongue, feet, heart and intestines.
Cantonese roast duck (siu ngaap, 廣州燒鴨) is relatively easier to prepare, with a duck going from farm to table in just eight hours. It’s part of the ‘siu mei’ (燒味) category of dishes, where meats are roasted either over an open fire or, more commonly, in large, gas-fired rotisserie ovens affectionately called ‘Apollo ovens’. Fun fact – this name comes from their apparent resemblance to a space capsule. Char siu, roast pork and roast goose are other popular types of siu mei, all sold from specialist shops where the glistening cuts and carcasses hang on hooks in the window, ready to be deftly cleavered into slices. Hong Kong is the city most associated with sui mei shops.
To prepare, cleaned ducks are seasoned inside and out with five spice-infused marinade and left for about an hour. Next, they’re gutted through the abdomen and the cavity is filled with aromatics like star anise, ginger and spring onion. Next, they’re sewn up, briefly boiled to contract the skin, then air dried for several hours. Roasted until they’re deeply burnished and the stuffing flavours have infused the flesh, they’re served hacked into pieces through the bone, with way less ceremony than their Peking cousins. A good Canto roast duck should have a slightly crisp skin, a thin layer of fat and very succulent, juicy meat; sometimes the chef will pour hot oil over the duck before serving, to tighten the skin and release aromas. Served as a topper for mounds of steamed white rice and boiled greens, plum or sweet and sour sauce for dipping is the ideal accompaniment for the on-the-bone chunks. This is a far more egalitarian meal than Peking duck but even so, it isn’t a dish home cooks in China or Hong Kong would tend to make. They’d head to their nearest roast shop for their bird, and so should you if you have one near.
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