It’s no secret that YouTube is an excellent place to find information, waste time, and get a new perspective on the world. I actually have found over the years that it tends to be my go-to source for figuring out all sorts of stuff. For instance, when I decided I…
- Wanted to learn to ride a unicycle - I found it on YouTube.
- Learn about using my SUP in whitewater – I found it on YouTube.
- Wanted to get “real” reviews on choosing my first compound bow – I found it on YouTube.
- Learn about what the Missouri River 340 was going to be like – I found it on YouTube.
- Learn how to make a GoPro mount for my canoe – I found it on YouTube.
- Needed to understand how to skin a rabbit because your kid won’t – I found it on YouTube.
Over this last winter I did my first bit of duck hunting and brought home a few Mergansers and a Mallard. Now I had only eaten duck once before and I didn’t have fond memories of it. It was after a 24-hour bender of heavy drinking and a very long flight from Colorado to Monte Carlo, Monaco. It’s not that I’m normally a lush, but you need to understand, this was shortly after 9/11 and a co-worker of mine was terrified to travel on planes after that tragic event. Long story short, we thought a few drinks would calm our nerves, and one case lead to another (it was all free on Lufthansa), and nearly a day later, I ended up in a French restaurant, completely hung over, and staring at a very oily duck that I just couldn’t stomach, no matter how I tried. But I digress.
With that memory in my mind, my ducks from the 2012/2013 season were left sitting chilled in the freezer for a few months while I got the nerve up to try and cook them. To make matters worse, not only had I brought home a Mallard but I kept the Mergansers I shot, and apparently they have a reputation no better than carp. Well our ethic is if you shoot it, you eat it, so I was going to find a way to cook the Merganser and make it edible.
Mallard – the other dark meat
Our brazed and baked duck breasts.
The problem with searching YouTube for something like “How to cook a Mallard Duck”, is that it is a good meat, and so lots of people have videos – and you have to watch a lot of videos. Unfortunately, you often have to keep a lot of additional ingredients on hand to spice up the recipes, as well. And the day I decided to cook, I hadn’t been shopping and the refrigerator was basically bare. So I carried on like any confident bachelor, convinced that by just mixing in a little of this and that, I could make it all work out with a little extra salt and pepper. After a few searches and video viewings, I shared two options with Megan. We decided that we’d braze the Mallard breasts in a sauce made of red wine, olive oil, and garlic and then bake them in the oven for about 6-minutes at about 450-degrees. It all went really, really well and both of us were quite impressed with the outcome. Mallard is a dark meat that tastes a little like the dark meat of a chicken but much richer and was very tasty with no gaminess at all.
Merganser - the carp of the sky
On the other hand, looking for recipes for “How to cook a Merganser” was a difficult challenge at best. There weren’t any videos on YouTube for cooking Merganser, just Department of Wildlife videos on their diet - a diet filled with pond sludge, river bottom silt, and sucking the slime off of weeds. And trying to find a “serious recipe” about cooking Merganser was like trying to talk with a friend who is a constant joker and couldn’t have a “serious” conversation to save their life. Every search on Mergansers brought me to joke recipes like – “Nail the Merganser to a board, cook it, take the Merganser off the board and throw it away, then eat the board.” There were about 50 variations of this story, here was my favorite, it was written by herblorentz78 and it came from “DuckHuntingChat.com”
The ONLY way to cook coots and mergansers
First you start by wrapping the breasts with premium bacon. I use the bacon I get from our annual pig butchering party, double smoked delicious. Then you put them in a glass dish with a lid to keep them moist. Bake at 400 degrees approximately 12 minutes or so. It is hard to tell rarity because of the red color of the meat. Then remove from oven, unwrap bacon, throw away breasts and eat bacon. Those breasts still won’t taste worth a damn no matter how you cook them. lol
As a reminder, we have an ethic in the house – you kill it – you eat it.
So clearly we had to improvise to get to something edible. So I thought to myself, what do you do to food that is questionable or normally inedible? Yes, you fry it. I then did another search on frying food on YouTube and found another tip “if you have meat that is a little tough, just cut it into narrow strips and maybe pound it a little then it doesn’t taste so tough when chewing”. This YouTube is freaking brilliant, so now we had a plan to employ both techniques along with a fry batter that is really simple to make – I also learned about it when cooking rabbit on YouTube from Kenny.
Cooking a Merganser
Megan enjoying the Merganser.
Well, I must say the Merganser was not as good as the Mallard, but it was pretty decent, and worth another try next season. Besides, we have way more Merganser than just about anything so there is a good chance that we’ll cross paths again. Now that I am done with this article, the only thing that I wish I had done was to have filmed it so I could post my own cooking video. Maybe next time, we still have several rabbit and three squirrels in the freezer. Now I know I haven’t seen any “How to cook squirrel” videos on YouTube.