Duck Roulade with Sweet 'N Sour Ginger Passion Fruit Sauce

 I will start off this post with a disclaimer about sausages.  They are not my favorite food.  Also, grinding meat and stuffing pig intestines is not my idea of a fun cooking project.  To begin with, our old grinder is a bust, as opposed to "the bomb", just so you know.  And secondly, I do not possess a sausage stuffer, nor have any plans to get one.  But it's okay, there were alternatives in our Daring Cooks' challenge for this round.

For the January-February 2013 Daring Cooks’ Challenge, Carol, one of our talented non-blogging members and Jenni, one of our talented bloggers who writes The Gingered Whisk, have challenged us to make homemade sausage and/or cured, dried meats in celebration of the release of the book Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn! We were given two months for this challenge and the opportunity to make delicious Salumi in our own kitchens!

As discerning readers may have noticed, I do have a fondness for duck, so thought I would give Michael Ruhlman's Duck Roulade, from his book Charcuterie, a try.  Though it is a fairly difficult process, which briefly stated, involves removing the skin in a piece large enough to envelope the rest of the duck, which has been ground into a filling, augmented with pieces of sauteed duck breast, herbs, seasonings, etc.


I briefly mentioned my grinder above, and not being a meat grinding expert, perhaps someone else could have had a more enjoyable time with it.  At any rate we persevered, though I ended up puting some of the meat into my mini food processer, in a state of nasty frustration, as it refused to exit the grinder properly   So of course, I was in no mood to take any photos of that.

I was able to skin the bird without too much trouble and got the required (in that recipe anyway) 5x10" rectangle for the next step, which was freezing and removing the fat from it.  Okay, we did all right with that as well.  However, after preparing the filling and laying it out on said skin, guess what?  The two long ends did not meet.  Not big enough.  So, improv being something remembered from drama classes, I held it in place as close as I could and wrapped the whole thing in cheese cloth, then tied it off with kitchen twine.

The next step was to lay the ducky sausage roll on a bed of sauteed carrots and onion, and roast at a low temperature.  The only problem, or maybe not necessarily one, was that removing my cheese cloth also removed the skin, which stuck to it, and possibly was the cause of the roulade breaking in several places  So we told ourselves, who wanted to eat that skin anyway?  And it would have been cut up eventually.

This left something resembling broken meat loaf, er...roll..  Luckily, it was a tasty one.  I had roasted the bones and made a nice stock, which reduced down, then augmented with ginger, lemon and passion fruit made a piquant Sweet 'N Sour Ginger Passion Fruit Sauce.  Mr. Roulade was served on a bed of sauteed Napa Cabbage, with some of the roasted carrots and onion added in.  Egg noodles on the side.  Turned out pretty yummy, if I do say so.