Super-luxury cheese and duck confit toasted sandwich
This is a simple lunch made luxurious through the use of two rich and luscious French ingredients: duck confit and Morbier cheese.
Morbier is a semi-soft, slightly elastic cheese which is made in the village of Morbier, in the Jura mountains, leading towards the Swiss alps. A distinctive layer of ash runs through the middle of it, and it has a wonderful nutty flavour. You can get a very similar cheese in the UK, called Ashcombe.
This sandwich is not for the faint-hearted; it’s for the very robust-hearted, and for people who have just taken a lot of exercise and are ravenous – keen skiers for example. For lesser mortals you might want to present this as an open sandwich – same amount of filling, but half the bread.
The endive salad cuts through this mountain of copious riches. An alternative salad would be a rocket salad dressed with raspberry vinegar and walnut dressing.
Super-luxury cheese and duck confit toasted sandwich
Serves – 7
Ingredients
- 1 x tin duck confit – 760g/1 lb 10 oz gross weight: 425g/15 oz net weight
- Four fat cloves of garlic
- 14 pieces of good, sturdy brown bread, brown sourdough ideally
- 660g/1 lb 8 oz Morbier or Ashcombe cheese
- 1tbsp. Dijon mustard
- Smoked salt crushed with a couple of cloves of peeled and crushed garlic
- Indonesian long black pepper
- 6 red and green endives
- vinaigrette
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 210°C.
- Empty out the confit into a large mixing bowl. If you warm the confit gently the fat becomes liquid and is easily drained off. Separate out the fat and put it in a Tupperware container – you’ll be keeping most of it in the fridge and using it for making roast potatoes. Throw out the bones and skin.
- Grease a flat roasting tray with some of the duck fat.
- Brush a bit more fat over one side of each of the pieces of bread.
- If you are using garlic crush that with a little smoked salt and mix in with the duck (which should include some jelly/aspic – that has lots of flavour) and the mustard. Grind over some pepper.
- Cut the cheese into seven slices
- Put seven slices of bread, greased side down, on the roasting tray, spread each with mustard.
- Divide the duck mixture between these pieces of bread. This will include the little bits of aspic which will dissolve and make the bread a little moist – none the worse for that.
- Top each with a slice of the Morbier
- Top each with the rest of the slices of bread – greased side uppermost.
- Put in the oven for about seven minutes, turn, return to the oven for another seven minutes by which time the cheese should be runny, and serve, with the salad.
