Poultry
Duck
Filed as poultry and behaves like fatty red meat, which is why it is the one bird whose skin is the whole exercise.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
A duck breast carries a thick fat cap under its skin that has to render before the skin can crisp, and rendering takes sustained moderate heat rather than high heat — run it hot and the skin sets over unrendered fat, which is the flabby result people complain about. The meat underneath is dark, dense and closer to beef than to chicken. Duck legs are the opposite problem: far more connective tissue, which needs long enough to break down, and a skin thick enough that the published frozen instruction is to prick it in several places so the fat under it can escape rather than steam the skin from beneath.
Why the cut matters
Duck is a poultry safety question and a red-meat cooking problem at the same time, and that combination is why it is worth a record of its own. The two cuts people cook are the breast and the leg, and they want almost opposite treatment.
Cooking pages
- Duck breast — Thirteen to fourteen minutes, and every minute of it is about the fat under the skin.
- Duck legs — Thirty to thirty-five minutes from frozen, and the published instruction is to prick the skin.
There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.