Yunnan Duck, But Make it Easy

Many of southeastern Yunnan’s most popular tourist spots—Puzhehei, Babao, and Bamei—are built along the banks of slow-moving rivers. These areas are known for their stunning karst landscapes, which are  reminiscent of what you’d see in neighboring Guangxi Province. But the two things people actually spend their time doing when they visit are, one, getting out on the rivers in small boats (sometimes for a leisurely float down a slow waterway, sometimes for a raucous time shooting each other with enormous water guns) and, two, eating the ingredients that are grown and raised in these freshwater landscapes. As a result, duck is common on restaurant menus here. But instead of making roast duck, like you’d find in Beijing or Hong Kong, this area’s cooks make duck stir-fries and quick stews—easier preparations that can be done in any restaurant kitchen. (For Yunnan-style roasted duck, you’ll need to head to Yiliang County, just east of Kunming, where they roast whole ducks over fragrant pine branches.) 

The most memorable duck dish I ever had while exploring this part of Yunnan was a fragrant bowl of beer-stewed duck (or “yellow duck,” huángjiǒng yā, 黄炯鸭) at Dragon Spring Restaurant, a popular spot run by a Zhuang family in the town of Babao. 

Babao is not totally unknown to Chinese tourists, but it was so unequipped for Western visitors that when my family and I arrived, we discovered that the hotel didn’t have procedures for accepting foreign guests. (Our very sweet and accommodating driver, Mr. Li, solved the problem by checking us in under his name.) When I visited, back in 2017, the town’s life centered around the local food market and other everyday businesses, rather than tourist-facing shops or activities. When we made our way to the nearby river and hired a boat to take us on a trip through the waterways, we floated past working farms full of rice paddies, flocks of docks, and even a few small plots growing corn. 

Babao is on the eastern edge of the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, in a primarily Zhuang area, so for dinner we made a beeline to the largest, busiest Zhuang-style restaurant in town. The two-story spot was packed with local families enjoying a range of delicious-looking dishes, so when it came time to narrow down the choices and order dinner for my family, I did what I often do when I’m in Yunnan: I asked the owner, Wei Hanyaan, what the restaurant’s specialties were. (As usual, I also explained that I was researching Yunnan’s foodways for a cookbook and asked if I could watch the cooks prepare my food, so I could write down the recipe.) She recommended a few Zhuang-style dishes including some beautiful purple sticky rice and this stewed duck cooked in local beer and seasoned with ginger, garlic, oyster sauce, sesame oil and a hint of local chili-bean paste. 

Not surprisingly, the duck was the star of the meal. It was fragrant and rich, and when I tried it, I was struck by a sudden sense memory: the flavors instantly brought to mind the kinds of old-school American holiday meals my grandparents would have made in the 1950s or ‘60s (or, to be more precise, a mid-century American Christmas dinner with Chinese characteristics). It took me a while to figure out why the flavors felt so familiar—after all, this town, and style of cooking, were about as far from the U.S. as you can get. After a while, I realized the combination of Shaoxing wine, oyster sauce, duck and sesame oil, when cooked together, offer the same kind of salty, rich, umami-filled flavor profile you’d get if you served a Western duck dish with a sauce that included sherry (a mid-century cooking staple) and onions.

I also noted that the ingredients in this dish—the combination of ginger, garlic and scallions, as well as the oyster sauce and sesame oil—were things you’d usually find in dishes made in southern China, rather than in Yunnan. (This was, in fact, the only time in the seven years I was researching my book that anyone I worked with used oyster sauce. Until this meal, I hadn’t considered it something I’d ever find in a Yunnan pantry.) Though we were still on the western side of Yunnan’s border with Guizhou, this meal—as well as the gorgeous landscape it came from—offered a clear reminder that lines on a map don’t always reflect the natural, cultural and culinary realities on the ground.

Butchering Duck for Stir-Frying or Stewing

This recipe uses only half a duck, but I’ve never seen a bird sold this way, so I cut a whole bird in half for this dish and set the remainder aside for another purpose (like roasting or frying). If you decide to freeze the other half of your duck, you’ll want to be sure that your bird hasn’t already been frozen before, as freezing and thawing meat more than once can affect its texture and also increase bacteria growth. Alternatively, you could double this recipe, to feed more people, but if you do so, you’ll need to cook it in two batches, to avoid crowding the wok.

The technique for cutting a duck into pieces that are small enough to be stir-fried or stewed is similar to how you’d cut up a chicken for the same purposes: essentially, you need to take the duck apart, removing the limbs from the body, then cut each section into relatively even pieces that are around 1 ½-inch wide (small enough to cook through quickly). This is how I do it, but, realistically, you could cut up the duck however works best for you as long as you end up with pieces of the right size.

1. Remove the head and neck, then separate them, setting the head aside for another use (such as making duck stock). Cut the neck crosswise into 1½ inch long pieces; this will go into your stew.
2. Remove the feet and set them aside for another use (like stock).
3. Cut the body in half, lengthwise, cutting between the breasts on the front side and along the side of the backbone on the back side. Set aside the side with the backbone attached for another use and continue cutting the side of the duck that does not still have the backbone attached.
4. Remove the leg and thigh from the body and separate them. Cut the leg crosswise into three pieces and cut the thigh into 1 ½ inch wide strips (if the leg and thigh have pieces attached that are just fat and skin, you can remove those and cook them separately, in the stew, or reserve them for another use).
5. Remove the wing from the body and remove the end piece, after the second joint; set this aside for another use. Cut the rest of the wing in half at the joint and cut each piece in half again, for a total of 4 pieces of wing for the stew.
6. Cut the body crosswise into pieces about 1 ½ inch wide. 

Steps for Making Yellow Stewed Duck—First, You Fry

While this stewed duck is much easier to make than a roast duck—the whole process, including the butchering, only takes about 20 minutes once you’re comfortable with it—it does include two stages.

Stage One: Frying

The first step to making this recipe is to deep-fry the duck with aromatics and chilies. This is easy to do in a wok, even if deep-frying isn’t something you’re used to doing in a home kitchen. You just have to take common sense precautions like making sure you put your ingredients in slowly and carefully (so the oil doesn’t jump up and burn you). Here’s how I approach it (the technique I learned from the cooks at Dragon Spring).

• Before cooking, I set up a big heat-proof bowl (ideally metal) with a fine-mesh sieve over it and set it next to your wok. This way I’ll be ready to drain the oil from the wok when I’m done cooking.
• I only add enough oil to the wok to just cover all the ingredients (for this recipe, they don’t need to be fully submerged at all times). This way, when I add ingredients, I don’t risk overflowing the wok. The 4 cups called for in the recipe is totally sufficient. 
• I don’t drop the ingredients into the hot oil—I just slide or place them into the oil slowly. I add the aromatics and chilies by putting them into my wok shovel and submerging them, carefully pour in the Shaoxing wine, and use tongs to add the duck one or two pieces at a time (you could also use the wok shovel if you’re not worried they’ll slide off).
• When it’s time to drain the oil out of the wok, I pour it through the strainer set on top of the bowl the oil goes into. The cooks in Babao just used a perforated scoop to hold the ingredients in the wok while they poured the oil out, but I like to have two hands on my wok, for more control, instead of trying to carefully pour from a heavy wok with one hand while holding a scoop with the other.

When fried this way, the duck won’t end up with a crispy texture—we’re not breading it or cooking it at a high enough temperature to get a fried chicken-style crunch—but it will be cooked through and some areas will be lightly browned.

Stage Two: Stewing

Once the duck is fried, the stewing process is short and easy and only takes around 10 minutes. 

• First you add very weak Chinese beer to the wok and let the duck boil in the beer for a couple minutes.
• Once the beer has boiled a bit (and the alcohol has cooked off), you add the other seasonings—the oyster sauce, sesame oil, chili oil and dark soy sauce—to make a rich, flavorful sauce. (In this version I’ve subbed chili oil and a pinch of sugar for the doubanjiang used in the restaurant; the chili-bean paste found in the Wenshan area is a hyper-local ingredient with a flavor that can’t really be replicated by the sauces available in other parts of China.) The duck simmers in this sauce for a few minutes, too, so that it absorbs some of the flavor. The scallions get added toward the end of this cooking process, so they can soften and absorb some flavor.
• Lastly, you add a cornstarch slurry to the wok, to thicken the sauce.

For more delicious duck dishes, try Taylor’s Sichuan Crispy Duck (Xiangsu Ya, 香酥鸭) and Zoe’s Duck Fat Shaobing (Yayou Shaobing, 鸭油烧饼).