Comparing Duck Legs
Photo by Melissa Schneider.
Having made batch after batch of duck confit in the last few months, I'm convinced that legs from foie gras ducks produce a superior product. However, that limits your purchasing options—there are only four foie gras producers in the United States, and only two sell at the retail level. How do they stack up against each other?
Sonoma Saveurs—the retail arm of Sonoma Foie Gras—requires a minimum order of 24 legs, even though they send you three packs of eight. I don't remember the exact price, but they cost about $5 per leg. That's a prodigious amount of duck confit, even if you use 13 for dinner at a friend's house.
Hudson Valley Foie Gras offers a more consumer-friendly option: a six-pack of legs for $21. And my order came with a magret that they tossed in free of charge. "Oh, we do that every now and then," said the customer service rep when I called to tell them about it (Expect a post about salt-cured duck breast in the near future). On the other hand, Sonoma Foie Gras seems to do a better job of trimming the legs. One of the Hudson Valley legs had a tear in the skin, and others seemed roughly cut. Those are aesthetic gripes: They still produce delicious confit. But Hudson Valley also trims a huge amount of fat from the legs. When I ordered from Sonoma Foie Gras, I rendered 3 1/2 pounds of duck fat from the skin I trimmed before I cured the legs. I only recovered 1/2 pound of fat from 12 Hudson Valley legs. (This might make the Hudson Valley legs comparable in price to the Sonoma legs, because duck fat is expensive).
This leaves you a few options. Buy the Hudson Valley legs, and overlook the negatives (probably only I care about the aesthetics of duck confit, but the low yield in rendered fat is bothersome). Alternately, buy the Sonoma legs with some friends or ask to piggyback on a restaurant's order, if you have a good relationship with the owners. Each vendor has pros and cons, but I'm inclined to order from Sonoma Saveurs and try to find friends to buy legs from me. (Remember that you can keep duck confit buried in fat in the refrigerator for two months or more.)
If Sonoma Saveurs ever sells individual eight-packs, I'll let you know. Likewise, I'm writing Hudson Valley to see if they offer a "restaurant" line with more fat on the legs.
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