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Are you looking for a delicious duck sauce for the holiday season, for Christmas, or just for any regular everyday occasion? In this recipe, I will show you how to make orange duck sauce, also known as duck sauce l'orange or bigarade. The rich, refreshing, and sweet citrus orange sauce perfectly balances the succulent, fatty duck meat. Welcome to the Sauce and Gravy channel. This is Johnny Mac, and we are going to make an orange duck sauce, or as it's known, orange duck. So buckle up. Let's go. Now, this is the best duck sauce. It goes with it perfectly, perfectly. It has a sweet and sour taste with a hint of acidity that cuts through that delicious, fatty, juicy, wonderful duck meat. It just falls apart, goes with it so incredibly well. It's a wonderful combination. So we're going to start here by zesting three oranges and a lemon. So let's go. If you have a microplane, use the microplane. If not, you can use a potato peeler. Peel off some of the wonderful zest. Try not to get any of the pith. And then you can take a knife and julienne those zest pieces just to make them nice and straight and more or less sticks, just like you see here. You don't have to have a mandolin to do this. Now, it's a good idea to go ahead and start a pot full of water. If you want to crank that up to high heat, you'll get that to a boil. Once it gets to a boil, you'll take all of the zest from all of the oranges and the lemon. And then you'll just go ahead and throw that in there. And you'll cook this for 5 minutes or blanch it for 5 minutes. It'll make those guys nice and tender. Another option is also more or less candy these days. If you want to put a little bit of sugar in that water, make it a little bit of a syrup and cook it for 5 minutes in that sugared water. It'll also make them nice and sweet. But for this recipe, we're just sticking with good old plain water. While our zest is getting a little bit hotter and their wonderful jacuzzi bath, we're going to go ahead and take those three oranges that we zested. We're going to cut them and we're going to go ahead and juice them. These three oranges, they should make about one cup or 237 milliliters of juice. Okay, our zest is done. Blanching. They've been in that jacuzzi for 5 minutes. It's time to go ahead and take them out something to strain them with, and then grab a bowl so you can dump that out. Or you can do this over the sink if you'd like. Whatever is easiest for you. But go ahead and get all that wonderful zest out. It's now time to go ahead and cool these guys down. So we're going to give them a nice cold water bath. You can put ice in it if you'd like. It's not entirely necessary. As long as it's cold water. We're going to go ahead and submerge these guys in there. It'll cool them down, get that cooking process stopped, as well as rinse them. It'll also help them retain that wonderful color, that bright, vibrant orange color so it'll look wonderful in the presentation at the end with the wonderful sauce. Now, to go back to the oranges again, we're juicing three oranges. It'll make about one cup or 237 milliliters of juice approximately. You can juice them however you'd like. I have a homemade electric juicer. You don't have to have that. You can do it by hand. You can juice it into a bowl. We're going to go ahead and prepare the Gastrique now. So we're going to take the sugar, three tablespoons of sugar or 45 grams. Swirl this guy around a little bit so it coats the bottom of the pot. And then we're going to go ahead and throw in 1/3 cup or 79 milliliters of red wine vinegar into this. For this recipe, we're going to go ahead and combine these two from the start. We're going to go ahead and cook them down to a nice syrup consistency. There is another alternative way to do this. You can always start with the sugar. Put a little drip of water in the sugar, caramelize the sugar until it's an amber color. And then once you get to that point, you can go ahead and throw in the red wine vinegar or the vinegar. And from that point, you'll reduce that down. But for this recipe, we're going to combine them together. I find it a lot easier and a little bit less of a hassle to cook down that Gastrique. You definitely want to keep your head kind of back because it will definitely knock your socks off if you take a big, heavy whiff of this in that vinegar is strong my friends. So kind of step back, step back a little bit as you're doing this, but don't shy away from this. It only takes a few minutes to do this. It reduces down pretty quickly. And the last thing you want to do is burn this. You don't really want to burn it because it becomes a big mess. And this Gastrique is starting to smell really good. It's starting to get a little bit thicker. The goal here is to get a nice thick, syrupy, dark consistency. So we're starting to get to that point. It's bubbling nicely. It's nice and thick. Now we can go ahead and add the orange juice. And now we have the orange juice in the Gastrique. We're going to go ahead and grab a spoon. We're going to mix all this together. We want to dissolve this Gastrique. So the sugar and vinegar, this little bit of a syrup mixture, we're going to dissolve that into our orange juice. So go ahead, grab that spoon, stir it around well. Once the mixture is well combined, you're ready to go. We're going to add our brown veal stock, or you can just use any kind of brown stock if you'd like. We'll add that to the mixture, and then we're going to go ahead and turn this up to about a medium heat. You want to get this guy to a simmer. And once it starts to simmer, you'll see a lot of impurities, a lot of fat rising to the top. Always my friend. It's a good idea to grab a spoon or a ladle and start skimming off those impurities. Get all that stuff out. You'll have to do this throughout the entire reduction process because there's a lot of impurities coming out. And you want a nice, clean sauce. We're going to go ahead and we're going to go ahead and reduce this mixture by half. My friends, this is a delicious sauce. If you're going to make duck breast, if you're going to cook duck well, then you need to go with the sauce. You don't need to do it halfway, more or less. You need to go with the sauce. This sauce is not that difficult. It tastes absolutely exceptional. So it's definitely worth all the time and effort that you're going to put into it. It's wonderful for any kind of special occasion, for Christmas, for any kind of party or any kind of holiday type of everyday special occasion in your home. All right my friend. So we're starting to get a little bit closer to finishing the sauce. So this is the final finishing step before we bring everything together. For this particular sauce recipe, I'm using duck breast, but the same type of principle applies. If you were to cook a whole duck, let's say you cook it in the oven. For this specific recipe, I'm going to use a pan. I'm going to pan-sear the breasts. If you were to cook the duck in the oven, you can cook it in the oven and use the drippings. The whole goal here is just to get the wonderful fond on some sort of surface. So for this recipe, we're going to go ahead and throw the duck breast side down into the pan. We're going to cook this, and duck is a pretty fatty bird. It'll render out that fat, cook it slowly on the skin side down, and then flip it over, cook on the other side a little bit. But you definitely don't want to burn this fond. So make sure that you're paying attention to and make sure you don't burn it. And you want this fond to be a nice golden brown. But once you're done with that, go ahead and take that duck out. Set it aside, cover it up, keep it warm, let it rest. Check out all this wonderful fat that that duck rendered out. Now, duck fat is absolutely wonderful to cook with. I suggest you save it. So get a container, put it in the refrigerator, save it for later. But check this out, you guys. Look at all this wonderful fond, all these little brown, golden brown pieces. Beautiful. That's what we're looking for. Beautiful flavor. So we've been reducing the stock mixture by half while we were cooking the duck. And now it's time to go ahead and throw it into our wonderful pan with all this wonderful fond. And we're still on medium heat here, you guys. Get a flat-head spoon. Go ahead and start scraping up all this fond from the bottom. This flavorful fond, my friends. Go ahead and make sure you get every little bit of it. Scrape the sides, scrape the bottom. Just scrape as much as you can. And as you can see, this wonderful liquid that we've reduced, it's glossy. It's oily. It's reduced down really well. That's what we're looking for there, you guys. But we're on medium heat, scraping the bottom, looking good. Just make sure you get everything. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to reduce this mixture by half. You can reduce it further if you'd like. If you like a thicker sauce, you can certainly do that. It's really just a matter of taste. This sauce has come together well. It's reduced down really well. It's nice and glossy. Check it out. You can even see my reflection in that sauce. Amazing. So it's been about 5 minutes. And we've reduced that by half. So we're looking really good. This is exactly where I want it to be. So we're going to go ahead and clean out the pan and something to strain this liquid. There's a lot of pieces in there, a lot of pieces of that duck that we don't want to stay in the sauce. So we're going to go ahead and clean it up a little bit. Grab a strainer and go ahead and pour that into that nice, fresh, clean pot. It's now time to finish off this sauce. We're going to go ahead and put two tablespoons of an orange liqueur. If you have Cointreau, go ahead and use that. Use whatever you have. But we'll put two tablespoons in. It's now time to add another little friend to the party, our orange zest and lemon zest. Go ahead and grab that. Throw them in. And we're off the heat here, you guys. So we're off the heat. So no more heat, we're just going to go ahead and mix these guys together. Make sure they're well combined, and as always, it's a good idea to taste the sauce. Make sure it tastes right. If you need to adjust the seasoning, add a little bit of salt, add a little bit of pepper to your liking. Just make sure it tastes the way you want it to taste. And there you have it, my friends. You have orange duck sauce, or duck sauce l'orange, or bigarade. A truly wonderful sauce for duck. Wow. All right, thanks for watching. Please leave your comments below. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comment section below as well. If you love sauces and gravies, whether they're savory or sweet delicious, smash that button below. There's more sauces and gravy coming and remember, my friends, to live and love and make gravy.