Homemade Peking Duck

Homemade Peking Duck: How to Blow up a Duck

After getting through deep-fried Sichuan duck, I wanted to see if I can make decent Peking duck at home. The elaborate process takes days so I hope you’ll join in the process and see what happens along the way. You’ll either laugh, cry, and/or get hungry.


Where and how to buy a duck? I don't have a live poultry shop near me so I bought my duck at a Chinese market in San Jose, California. Such a grocery store has a high turnover of duck and they are freshly butchered with the head and feet still attached. Don’t be turned off as that is how they traditionally come. Do your best to find an unblemished duck and check the packed date. They are gutted and cleaned already. The price for a 4 1/4 pound duck was just under $11 so it was a deal. Specialty grocers will charge you about $30 for a duck that's been defrosted! It pays to shop ethnic for ingredients such as this one.


I blew up a duck before for the very crispy Sichuan duck but this time I wanted to make sure I did things right. Once home I studied up again on Peking duck cookery. The key to getting crisp skin on Peking duck is apparently to blow air in between the skin and flesh so as to separate them, allowing the fat to melt away during roasting. I have a feeling there are a few other things involved but blowing up the duck was my first step and a major obstacle. How to do it? I wasn’t quite sure. I did a fair amount of research in my cookbook library, and a few of you contributed tips. Tools for blowing up the duck  included:

Bamboo tube: Chinese cooks originally used a large bamboo tube and human wind power to blow up the duck but seemed like you'd need very strong lungs.  That wasn’t for me.

Air compressor: There’s an informative YouTube video of Ming Tsai’s Peking duck on Iron Chef battle duck. I watched it again and was about to go over to my neighbor’s house to borrow his. However, my problem is that I’m not good with home improvement machinery. Give me a paint brush and I’m okay but no power tools. What if I set the compressor on high and blow the duck into smithereens? I’d have to drive 45 minutes to get another duck!

Bicycle pump: I don’t have one and didn’t think that my friends would lend me theirs.  Ducks and tires are not the same to them.

If blowing through a bamboo tube can inflate a duck, how about using the plastic foot pump that came with my exercise balance ball? I pumped up the ball, why not a duck?

Rory agreed to help me. He washed the pump while I prepped the duck. Here’s what we did:

[Note that these photos combine my two duck blowing up experiments. The first time I cut off the wing joints and feet and the duck blew up just fine. You have to cut them off with minimal skin tearing to ensure that the duck inflates like a balloon. It's wiser to chop off the appendages after blowing up the duck, which is what I did the second time and prescribe below. If the image of the duck is devoid feet and wingless, pretend that they are there!]

1. I first pulled out the excess fat in the body cavity near the rear opening. Then, following a tip from Eileen Yin Fei Lo in Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking, I scrubbed down the duck with table salt, rinsing it well and patting it dry with paper towel. This refreshes the duck. 

2. We set the duck, breast side up, on a baking sheet atop a folding table. Isewed up the duck’s abdominal cavity with a bamboo skewer, breaking it to prevent it from getting unwieldy. The duck needs to be more or less sealed for the air to travel well. 

3. You need a hole to stick the pump in so I gave the duck a tracheotomy, piercing a hole at the bottom of its neck with a paring knife.

4. Then, Rory worked the pump with his foot while I held on to the pump anddirected the air flow, first left, then right. The duck inflated, showing some rather interesting 6-pack abs (see top of this post). Who would have thought that ducky was such an athlete?

5. What about the back side? Nothing was happening there. So I flipped over the duck, made another incision near the nape (bottom of the neck), and we blew more air into the back area. Peking duck is all about skin so why not loosen all that we can?

6. Some air is released once the pump is removed but it remained kinda puffy. I then cut off the first two-joints of the wings and the lower part of the leg, just below the duck’s knees. With fewer dangling appendages, the duck is easier to manipulate. 

7. Finally, per Eileen's suggestion, I stuck a bamboo chopstick from one wing to the next in order to make the duck spread its arms out. That arrangement facilitates even cooking later on.

Next Step

I hope you didn’t blow up a duck over the weekend and wait for me to let you know what to do with it next! If we were together in real time, I would have blown up the duck with my exercise ball pump and then moved right into this next and equally crucial step in preparing Peking duck: scalding the skin.


Why scald the skin? It tightens up the pores, facilitating drying and crisping. It's a step that is as important as the initial blowing up of the duck. I’ve read several Peking duck recipes that tell cooks to do things like “clean the duck well before dousing it with a pot of boiling water, then hang it up to dry thoroughly – either leave it in a drafty place overnight or use a fan heater or hairdryer to speed up the process.” Deh-Ta Hsiung wrote that inChinese Regional Cooking (1979) and frankly, it was rather intimidating. Modern recipes add a touch of practical advice by telling you to use a meat hook. As you can imagine, there are some rather cruel steps to be taken here, namely:

1) Stick a metal meat hook into the duck’s neck.
2) Pour boiling water all over its body.
3) Hang it up to dry.

Yours truly has a set of meat hooks purchased years ago from a Chinese restaurant supply shop. It’s nothing but a heavy-duty “S” hook with a very sharp end. I’d been saving those hooks for char siu pork and any other Chinese-style roasting projects such as this one. Doing this step in a restaurant kitchen is probably easy as there are likely more places to hang the duck up and ceremoniously throw water at it. And like I’ve seen in Hong Kong, you can hang the duck out in a back alley to dry.

In my home kitchen, I decided that scalding the duck should be a two-person job, like pumping up the duck. Projects like homemade Peking duck takes a fair amount of thinking before doing. Rory and I paused between pumping and scalding to discuss strategy and safety. Our final game plan was:

Me: Stick the hook through the neck, a couple inches below the head so as to have the broadest base possible. I’m not good with duck anatomy so it was quite hard (literally) to force the meat hook through just right.
Rory: Pour a kettle of just-boiled water onto the duck instead of ladling or dousing the poor thing. The kettle allows you to control the flow of water and prevents potential domestic disasters.
Me: Hold the duck over the sink. No one ever mentions this in a recipe. Where do you hang the duck? Done over the sink, the water quickly goes down the drain. 

Scalding the duck made its skin taught, somewhat smooth but also goose-bumpy. After scalding, the duck has to hang to dry before it gets rubbed with a colorant of mostly diluted maltose or honey. Rory diligently set up two sawhorses in the garage, with a metal extension rod between them:

We hung the duck and after 15 minutes, it rolled off the sawhorse support with a thud and we ran back into the garage to fish the duck from the roasting rack that it fell upon. I suggested hanging it on the garage door opener mechanism which is about 8 feet high, but my husband didn’t want to risk opening the garage and having a poultry accident.

I also didn’t like letting raw poultry sit out and the duck kinda got gamey smelling. In the end, I stuck the duck on a roasting rack in the fridge, which I imagined, simulated a very cold, dryish environment. I left the duck uncovered overnight. That was duck #2 and I eventually deep-fried the duck for the fragrant and very crispy Sichuan duck. I experimented with the blowing and scalding to see if those techniques did anything for the deep-fried duck and they didn’t.

Last week’s duck #3 was destined to be roasted as Peking duck. I thought about it more and got smarter. Forget the hook and hanging. Following a tip in the 1986 cookbook, Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery, I decided to scald and tan the duck in one step. Hom, a chef, TV personality and author,  has you simmer the following for 20 minutes:

3 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce [I used 1 1/2 tablespoon dark, 1 tablespoon light soy sauce as his duck was a brown-black color]
1 lemon, sliced 1/4 inch thick
2/3 cup Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
4 cups water 

Then he instructs you to ladle the mixture over the duck, as if to bathe it. I put the blown up duck (remember it has not been scalded) on a baking sheet. Then I ladled the hot seasoning liquid over the duck. With each progressive coating, the duck got darker and its skin tightened.  I turned the duck over and coated the back too. The fact that the duck laid in a pool of liquid didn’t matter. When done, the duck skin was smooth and a lovely tan color.

To dry it, I put the duck on a roasting rack set in a roasting pan and slid the whole thing in the fridge. Uncovered, the duck dried out slowly for 2 nights.

Each day, the duck got a little darker – with at the end what looked like an enviable San Tropez, Ban de Soleil kind of golden tan (above photo). When I touched the skin, it felt dry with slight moisture, just a tad tacky. As I monitored the duck’s progress over the course of days, I pondered the roasting process. 

I poked and examined the blown up, scalded and tanned duck several times a day to see if it (1) felt dry to the touch and (2) looked like parchment. Those were the tactile and visual cues that I had gathered from a number of recipes. When the duck arrived at that threshold – around the 40 hour mark, it was ready for roasting. I could have sat for longer without harm, I believe.

My duck was sufficiently dry and I could kind of make out the flesh underneath the skin at several points. Translucency does not equal transparency. Now it was time for the big decision: How to roast the duck? Traditionally, it was done with a wood fire and the ducks hung over the hot embers to roast. Can you imagine the smoky fragrance and also the bits of fat dripping down on the coals? I've seen such craftsmanship and it is tough cooking. For modern home cooks like me who aim to make a respectable rendition of Peking duck, the roasting options include:

• Put the duck directly on the oven rack, per Eileen Yin-Fei Lo in Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. I have a self-cleaning oven but the thought of scrubbing the oven racks made me veer away from this approach. I am my own clean-up crew.
• Hang the duck on meat hooks and suspend it from one of the oven racks. My oven is large but didn’t have the height for that!
• Put the duck on a roasting rack in a roasting pan, which is what most other recipes recommend. This seemed most feasible but how can I do it strategically?

Regardless of how the duck was placed in the oven, a pan of water should be put underneath to catch dripping fat. If there wasn’t any water, the fat would cause a royal mess in the oven and quite a lot of potential smoke too.

Where to put the duck in the oven? I positioned the oven rack so that the duck would sit in the middle of the oven. Then I poured about 1/4 inch of water into the roasting pan. The roasting rack I made sure sat above the rim of the roasting pan so as to have more heat circulation all around the duck

What temperature to roast the duck? I decided on starting the duck at high heat and then reducing the heat to a moderate level. The logic is give the skin a head start with crisping and then to slowly roast the fat off from underneath the skin. So I roasted at 475F for 15 minutes then 70 minutes at 350F. The house filled with wonderful duck roastiness. Rory and I frequently peered through the oven window to check on the duck’s progress. It hissed a lot at the beginning but then settled into a slow steady roast. The result is the duck at the top of the page. The skin was crisp and stayed that way for a good 30 minutes or so, after it had deflated a touch. The above photo reflects a half hour out of the oven.

The major test was when I cut the duck up. (Do remove the chopstick before attacking the duck with a knife.) What did I see? The skin had indeed separated from the flesh! In the close up photo of the leg below, that skin was like edible fatty paper as there was hardly any visible fat left! Shazam. While the skin was still in its prime crispness and the meat warm, we dove in with thinly sliced scallion, hoisin sauce, and Chinese steamed rolls that I had thawed.

The skin was terrifically crisp, not fatty but rich tasting. The flesh was moist but not overly so, but not dry either by any means. All in all, the duck was a major success. We ate everything but the bones. This was my first homemade Peking duck and I don’t think it will be the last.