This Precursor to Peking Duck Is the Perfect Centerpiece for a Home-Cooked Banquet

Nanjing roast duck (南京烤鸭 Nanjing kaoya ) is a dish that hides in plain sight. It has existed for hundreds of years; it is the ancestor of the globally famous Peking duck; and yet most people—even Chinese people—have never heard of it. It’s not even the most famous duck dish from Nanjing; that would be salted duck. But here’s my hot take: Nanjing roast duck is actually tastier than both of its better-known compatriots. 

Roasted over wood and served bathed in a sauce made from its own sweet cooking jus, Nanjing roast duck is perhaps the pinnacle dish of a duck-obsessed city. Unlike Peking duck, whose gastronomic pleasure comes from creating symphonic little bites out of duck skin, sugar, frilly green onions, cucumbers, sweet bean paste and pancakes, Nanjing roast duck is simple: just duck and sauce, subtly seasoned to draw out the natural sweetness of the meat itself. 

Fun fact: Peking duck is a derivation of Nanjing roast duck, and it was originally called Jinling roast duck, after Nanjing’s ancient name. The waterways and paddy fields of Jiangnan are ideal for duck farming; even today, ducks are cheaper to raise there than chickens. The Ming emperors, based in Nanjing at the outset of the dynasty, loved the local roast duck, so, when they moved the capitol to Beijing, they brought their taste for duck with them. Bianyifang, the oldest Peking duck restaurant in China—established in 1416 during the Ming Dynasty—was actually called Jinling Sliced Duck (Jīnlíng piàn pí yā, 金陵片皮鸭) at its founding.

Over time, Beijing’s version of the dish became more refined in terms of technique and presentation, with crisp golden skin becoming the prized feature. The Pekin duck breed, first created in Beijing (decidedly NOT an ideal climate for duck farming) to meet imperial demand,  also evolved with the dish, bred selectively for thin skin, high fat and relatively less meat—characteristics these birds retain to the present day.

Bearing this imperial DNA, Peking duck is still a special-occasion banquet dish swaddled in ritual. By contrast, Nanjing roast duck is an everyday takeout staple, the meat dish that mothers and fathers pick up from the neighborhood duck shop on their way home from work to round out a dinner of quick vegetable stir-fries. With its savory-sweet flavor, tender flesh and addictive sauce, it also tends to be more popular with children than salted duck, which has a more adult flavor profile. Growing up, it was the one dish I begged for every week, and my parents would ask the vendors to bag up extra sauce for me to dip steamed buns into. 

If Beijing has a handful of legendary roast duck restaurants with photos of foreign dignitaries on their walls, Nanjing has legions of roast duck stalls with nary a door between them. If you ask a Nanjinger where to get the best roast duck, they’ll tell you to walk the alleys around your 小区(xiǎoqū), or residential community, and look for the window with the longest line at 5 p.m.  

So, why isn’t Nanjing roast duck more well known?

My guess is that there are a few overlapping reasons. The first is that, as with pretty much all oven-roasted foods, nobody makes this dish at home in China (because few people have ovens), so there are very few recipes for it (and exactly zero in English, before now). The second is that there’s no major Nanjing diaspora outside of the city itself. Unlike Cantonese roast duck, a spiritual cousin, there are no Nanjing ducks hanging in roast-shop windows in New York or Los Angeles, simply because there are very few Nanjingers in the U.S. The third is that Nanjing roast duck does not travel well, and it does not keep well. The sauce is the defining feature of this dish, and it must be poured over the duck right before serving for the best synthesis of flavor and texture. Reheating is tricky; the sauce gets greasy and the meat texture uneven. As a result, you can’t shelf-stabilize it, vacuum-seal it, and sell it by the millions to tourists, like you can with Nanjing’s salted duck. 

Picking a Bird for Nanjing Roast Duck

For this recipe, I went deep into the history and husbandry of Chinese duck breeds. A Nanjing roasting duck is meaty but not too fatty, and it has a rich but clean flavor. The ideal breed is aptly called the Jinling duck, and it’s a hybrid of the Eastern spot-billed duck and the Cherry Valley duck, a quick-growing domesticated Pekin-style duck breed developed in the U.K. The spot-bill brings flavor; the Cherry Valley brings fat.

In the U.S., the two most commercially available duck breeds are Muscovy and Pekin. I tested this recipe using Muscovy ducks, Pekin ducks and a goose. The Muscovy ducks, originating in South America and belonging to a different species and genus altogether, were too gamy. (In fact, I learned that “Muscovy” is a confusion of the word musky.) Western duck recipes tend to call for duck cooked rare or medium rare, which Muscovy ducks are well-suited for. But Chinese people cook duck to well done, and at that point, Muscovy duck flesh is very livery.

The goose was my favorite, naturally sweet with just the right amount of fat, but it’s not the most accessible bird. Pekin is the most common duck sold, especially in Western stores. If it doesn’t say the breed on the label, it’s Pekin. Pekin flesh is on the blander side but perfectly acceptable; just try to find “Confucian” or “Buddhist” style birds, which means you’re getting the whole duck, with head and feet intact. It’s easier to dry the duck out before roasting if you can hang it by its neck; you’ll also need the extra parts for the stock. 

Cooking Nanjing Roast Duck—No Bicycle Pump Needed (But Do Procure Trussing Pins)

The great news for home cooks is that Nanjing roast duck is very doable in a Western-style oven—and much more achievable than Beijing duck. You may have seen finicky Peking duck recipes that call for separating the bird’s skin from its meat with a bicycle pump. I have tried it, and I do not think it’s possible to achieve even 75% success on Peking duck as an amateur with a standard oven. It’s the pinnacle of imperial banquet cuisine for a reason! However, I do think it’s very possible to achieve 75% success, and better, with Nanjing roast duck.

This dish is about the meat, not the skin, and duck meat is actually fairly forgiving (more so than chicken or turkey, for example) because it has so much more fat. The technique is really about coaxing the right balance and depth from the soaking sauce, which is where I spent most of my energy in developing this recipe. 

The secret sauce, literally, is the inner marinade that gets sewn up into the duck at the very beginning of the cooking process. This soy-based marinade is flavored with celery leaves and apple, to impart herbaceous and fruity aromas, and it stays inside the duck’s cavity during drying and roasting. After the duck is cooked, the now-ducky liquid is carefully drained out and reserved. This belly jus, along with a stock made from the offcuts—the head, neck, feet and wingtips—make up the soul of the soaking sauce.

It’s very important that this precious marinade does not leak out during the drying and roasting stages of the cooking process. To make this work, you will need to truss the cavity closed with steel trussing pins. I initially tried sewing up the cavity with kitchen twine, but it was too loose; only trussing pins will gather and pinch the skin tight enough without ripping it. Also, do not skip the shower of boiling water over the trussed duck; it helps tighten the skin around the closures. 

After cooking, you fortify the drained inner marinade with many of the same ingredients that went into it (soy sauce, ginger, scallion, fennel seeds) plus a bunch of additional aromatics, including  Shaoxing wine, bay leaves, black cardamom, Sichuan pepper, star anise, aged mandarin peel (also often referred to as dried tangerine peel), and cassia bark. Then you simmer everything again to meld all the flavors into a deep yet balanced soaking sauce. At this point, you can also add red yeast rice, which is rice that has been cultivated with a red mold (Monascus purpureus). This rice is commonly used in Chinese cooking, particularly in southern China, as a natural dye, and it is also said to lower cholesterol. Chinese supermarkets sell it alongside other dried grains, and you can also find it online as a health supplement. Though it doesn’t have much flavor, a spoonful of red yeast rice adds a subtle red tint to sauces and braises. It’s like turning up the warmth setting in iPhotos, but in this recipe it’s completely optional.

In addition to the inner marinade, you’ll also need to make an outer marinade that gives the duck its beautiful lacquered bronze appearance (a step this dish shares with Peking duck). This outer marinade consists of oyster sauce for color and umami, maltose for color and sweetness, and plain white vinegar to help the mixture dry on the skin quickly. (Maltose is a very thick golden syrup derived from wheat and is used in Chinese recipes for roasting meat. If you have a hard time finding it, light corn syrup is a good substitute.)

I will not pretend that this recipe is short, or easy, but it is completely doable for any passionate and capable cook—and it is worth it! As we say in Nanjing, 无鸭不成席 (wú yā bùchéng xí): There’s no feast without duck.

For more fun duck-based dishes, check out Taylor’s Sichuan Crispy Duck (Xiangsu Ya, 香酥鸭) and Georgia’s Zhuang-Style Beer-Stewed Duck From Eastern Yunnan (Huangjiong Ya, 黄炯鸭), then take a look at Zoe’s recipe for Nanjing’s Famous Duck Fat Shaobing (Yayou Shaobing, 鸭油烧饼).