Recipe

Emeril Lagasse’s Arroz de Pato with Braised Duck 

The lauded chef shares a Portuguese rice dish from his new 34 Restaurant & Bar in New Orleans

A bowl of rice with slices of duck and oranges

Photo: Randy Schmidt


“Rice is a big part of Louisiana culture,” says Emeril Lagasse, the mega chef, TV host, and adopted native son of New Orleans. “And it goes beyond jambalaya. We eat a lot of rice. We grow it. I sometimes tell people there are forty-nine states and then there’s Louisiana, because it’s like no other.”  

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But long before Lagasse ladled his first bowl of red beans and rice, he ate and absorbed the rice culture of Portugal, fed to him by his mother, Hilda, who hailed from the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic. Growing up in the Portuguese-American enclave of Fall River, Massachusetts, the young Lagasse ate Hilda’s arroz de galinha, a.k.a. chicken rice, and rice studded with chouriço (pork sausage) and parsley. 

Rice first arrived in Portugal in the eighth century from Northern Africa, with the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. (Arroz derives from the Arabic word ’arúzz.) Over millennia, the grain became inseparable from Portuguese cuisine, and the country’s cooks built a repertoire of rice dishes: baked with octopus, simmered with salt cod, served soupy with razor clams. Even now, the Portuguese eat thirty-five-plus pounds of rice per year—four times the amount of their European compatriots. 

Lagasse’s current home, the Bayou State, is indeed America’s third largest grower of rice, and its farmers seed their flooded rice fields with crawfish, that iconic crustacean that grows in symbiosis with the crop. In the months between the rice and mudbug harvest, sportsmen wait in blinds on fields’ edges and levies, ready to shoot migratory ducks. 

Last fall, these cultures met when Lagasse opened 34, his first-ever Portuguese restaurant, in New Orleans’ Warehouse District. Servers there pile tables with conservas (tinned fish), Hilda’s rustic caldo verde, salt cod fritters, halibut cataplana, and piri piri chicken. There’s also, of course, rice, generously portioned and designed to share. 

A green booth with green and white tiles inside a restaurant
A booth inside 34.
photo: paprika studios
A booth inside 34.

Creamy and rich arroz de lagosta, or lobster rice, hails from chef de cuisine Chris Dos Reis’s coastal hometown of Nazaré, known for its monster surfing waves. A paella topped with rabbit sausage and Gulf shrimp is a kissing cousin to the Spanish version, complete with a crunchy layer of socarrat. Then there’s arroz de pato, a dish that would feel just as natural at a Louisiana hunting camp as it does at Lagasse’s sleek, 245-seat restaurant.    

Traditionally, arroz de pato combines braised duck meat, often wild, with chouriço, rice, duck stock, and aromatics. Home cooks pour the mélange into a clay pot or casserole and bake it until crispy. To adapt it for restaurant service and maximize its flavor, Lagasse simmers duck legs in port and orange juice until they’re tender enough to “tear with two forks,” hits the meat with a pop of sherry vinegar, and piles it into a cazuela, a shallow clay baking dish. On top goes a layer of Agulha rice that has rollicked in chouriço fat and then plumped in duck or chicken stock. (Lagasse sources the long-grain Portuguese rice and sausage from Portugalia Marketplace.) At last, the dish hits the oven to achieve a golden crust. Pro tip: “Take an egg yolk, beat it, drizzle it on top, and then put it in the oven,” Lagasse says. 

The chef adds: “At 34, rice is on every other table. It just makes a meal complete.”  


Ingredients

  • Arroz de Pato (Yield: 4 to 6 servings)

    • 2 tbsp. olive oil

    • 1 small onion, peeled and grated

    • 2 oz. chouriço, diced small

    • 2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

    • 1½ cups Agulha rice

    • 2½ cups duck or chicken stock

    • 1 bay leaf

    • Shredded meat from all of braised duck (recipe follows)

  • For the braised duck

    • ¼ cup olive oil

    • 1 medium onion, diced

    • 6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

    • 1 bay leaf

    • Pinch of hot paprika

    • 1½ cups port wine

    • Salt and freshly ground white pepper

    • 2 lb. duck legs

    • 1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice

    • 1½ cups duck or chicken stock

    • 2 tbsp. sherry vinegar, or to taste


Preparation

  1. Make the braised duck: In a deep sauté pan over medium heat, add the olive oil. When warm, add the onion and garlic, season with a pinch of salt, and sweat until translucent. Add the bay leaf and paprika and stir to combine. Deglaze the pan with the port wine and allow to reduce slightly. 

  2. Season the duck legs on both sides with salt and white pepper, then add the legs to the sauté pan, nestling them down to fit into the pan in one even layer. Add the orange juice and stock and bring to a simmer. Cook until the liquid has reduced so that it comes halfway up the duck legs. 

  3. Cover the pan, reduce the heat to low, and continue cooking until the duck legs are fork-tender and the meat easily pulls away from the bones. 

  4. Remove the duck from the broth and, when cool enough to handle, remove the meat from the bones and skin. Discard bones and skin. Using your fingers or two forks, shred the meat into small pieces, moistening with some of the remaining cooking liquid to keep the meat moist. Add the sherry vinegar and season to taste with salt and pepper. Set aside. 

  5. Make the arroz de pato: Heat a medium saucepan with a tight-fitting lid over medium heat. Add the olive oil and, when warm, add the onion and chouriço and sweat until tender. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, 2 minutes longer. Add the rice and cook, stirring, to toast. Add the stock and bay leaf, bring to a simmer, then cover, reduce heat to low, and cook until the rice is mostly dry and tender, usually about 18 to 20 minutes. Set aside briefly to steam, then uncover and fluff rice with a fork. 

  6. Preheat the oven to 450°F.

  7. Place the shredded duck meat in the bottom of a casserole dish (approximately 9-inch square or similar) or a similarly sized ovenproof Dutch oven and press to form an even layer. Add the fluffed rice over the duck meat, spreading to form an even layer about 1½ inches thick. Place the casserole into the oven and bake until the top is crispy and it’s heated through, about 10 minutes. 

  8. Serve hot.


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