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, with a vinaigrette of cranberry and rosemary maybe. 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, and ideally ready-sliced. You can buy ahead and freeze if you wish.
- 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
- paprika
- 6 red and green endives
- vinaigrette, maybe cranberry and rosemary
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 210°C, or to about 80°C if you don’t have a warming drawer. Using a tin opener, open the tin, leaving a very little unopened. Put the tin, with the tin lid still attached, in the cool oven for twenty minutes or so.
- Using oven gloves, drain off 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 – this is easiest done right beside your open rubbish bin. Cut the duck into bite size pieces and put it in a large bowl.
- 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. If your duck doesn’t have much aspic you may need to add some chicken stock, or some mayonnaise.
- Cut the cheese into seven slices
- Put seven slices of bread, greased side down, on the roasting tray, on a silicone sheet.
- 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, dusted with paprika, with the salad.
