Pato no tucupi

As tradition built it

Pato no tucupi

Serves 8. About 2 hours 30 minutes, plus at least an hour's marinating.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

The duck

• 1 (about 2kg) duck, in pieces
• garlic
• to taste salt and black pepper
• 60ml vinegar

The tucupi

• 960ml tucupi
• to taste salt and pepper

To finish

• 2 bunches jambu
• 2 tbsp oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• to taste hot pepper

To serve

• to serve white rice, farinha d'água or maniçoba

Method

1. Wash the duck and cut it into pieces. Season it with garlic, salt, pepper and the vinegar and leave it at least an hour.
2. Put it in a large pot, cover with water, and cook about 1½ hours, until tender. Drain it.
3. Heat the oven to 180°C. Roast the duck in a dish about 30 minutes, until golden.
4. Bring the tucupi to the boil in another pot and simmer it at least half an hour, to drive off the cassava's poison. Season it.
5. Pick the jambu leaves from the thick stems, keeping the fine stems chopped, and cook them in boiling salted water about 10 minutes, until tender. Drain.
6. Fry the onion in the oil until translucent.
7. Lay the duck in a large dish and cover it with the tucupi. Spread the jambu and onion over, and finish with hot pepper.
8. Serve hot with white rice, farinha d'água or maniçoba.

Notes

Indigenous cooks originally simmered duck in tucupi alone with cassava flour and pepper, with no roasting stage at all; the two-stage method given here, roasting the duck first, then finishing it in the tucupi and jambu sauce, is documented as the Portuguese-era addition.

The recipe is Valéria Cristina's, of Vó Naoca, learned from her grandmother Nair. Chef Lúcia Torres, for DOL in Belém, fries the duck with garlic and cumin pepper before roasting, boils the tucupi with garlic, chicória and alfavaca, and finishes the duck in it with the jambu. Chef Alinne Barros, in Diário do Pará, uses no oven: she browns the duck in olive oil after a cachaça marinade and cooks it about an hour in the tucupi, without jambu.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide confit, clarified sauce

Method

1. Confit the duck legs sous vide at a controlled low temperature, holding the meat properly moist through a longer cook than an open pot allows.
2. Crisp the skin separately over the Big Green Egg's direct heat only at the point of plating, keeping the roast character without drying the meat to get it.
3. Clarify the tucupi and jambu sauce through a chinois for a genuine sauce-grade finish rather than the traditional cloudy stew.
4. Dehydrate a portion of jambu leaf to a fine dust, finished over the plate as a controlled top note rather than folded, unevenly, into the pot.