Field Dressing Game: Duck Whole Bird

Description

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Video Transcription

hi guys I thought I'd do a video today field dressing a duck I've got this male duck here this is a Drake and I got this duck I'm just at the end of the season one shot with a couple of ducks which was quite fortunate but I thought I'd be good to do a video today just showing you how to dress the ducks ready for cooking and the resources that you can get off of it there are many quick ways of dressing game you see a lot of sort of demos out there or tutorials where you know you'll see Birds and especially birds in particular prepared very quickly because of the way they're built so you can stand on the wings pull the legs of a pheasant for example you're left with the breast but I quite like to take my time with dressing game you know obviously I spent a very long time going out and tracking around and hunting it and you know I filled it off as the animal a bit more respect and I quality's everything I can off of the animals even in some cases keeping the feathers all the height just to prepare them to make other things out of them there is a method of preparing a duck where you can just literally tear the breasts open like that you see the meat and then you can literally stand on the head and legs pull the brush tight with both hear both your hands and you're left with the breast and the rest you can discard there's lots of other ways as well but really we're going to be looking at dressing the whole bird today so the first stage is going to be plucking the bird so the first stage of plucking the duck can take a long time but there is an easier way if you choose a bit like a pheasant and the field dressing video of a pheasant that I've done you can just tear the skin and the feathers off all in one hit it's just generally you lose a lot of the fat that way we have to go and recover the fat off the skin so the best way really I find is just plucking it because then when you roast it with the fat becomes much tastier it does add to the flavor and makes it a lot better with duck especially I don't mind too much with pheasant so prefer a bit leaner duck it does really help but as a way of really plucking it if you've got a wax pot you can dip the duck in wax and tear the feathers off and it looks like you're taking like a boiled egg out of a shell for example but we'll start with the plucking process you can see the feathers this down here is very thick you've got lots of feathers to play with there and it's really nice actually a really beautiful animal but you want to go against the grain so the feathers are obviously growing out this way you want to be tearing it that way so we'll start by by plucking it and using the pinch approach with the clenched fist and the thumb you can see they're just start plucking that involves you get a bit messy but you know that's what plucking a bird's going to be like so I'm literally just pinching with the hand and thumb really think finger and thumb so you can see there were left of little tiny feathers everywhere and we will sort of experience that in the areas with the finer feathers with all the down and don't worry about that too much you can just blowtorch those awful or cook them off you know if you were cooking over a campfire for example they would burn off fairly quickly and they wouldn't really be anything to worry about at all you can obviously dip it in wax and then peel all of that off if you wish there are lots of different ways of doing it most people just kind of bake them off really with a flame or in the oven or over a campfire and I find that what works quite well so you can always hold a wing as well pluck around the wing the feathers on the wing will be too hard just to repair it like this we need to just take the wing off so you can just clean round the legs as well I wouldn't go too far down to the backside there because we can just take that off and then the gutting process obviously that will be all removed anyway just tidy up where you can and it would just clear that picture up for you of what you're working with

so you should be left with something a little bit like that you can see there we've still got the feathers on the wings and around the backside not see the head if we turn it over you can see I've sort of tidied up the back as well I don't want to go too far with it so I did manage to kind of tear the skin a bit or I managed to grab a few feathers of the wing just by mistake and tear the skin but that's - not too much of a problem so that might happen and I wouldn't worry too much about that but it's looking quite nice like quite a large duck quite healthy really and yeah we'll carry on with the next stage if you feel around here you will feel there is a tiny bit of meat there and you can try and rescue that if you wish but for me I generally just take it off at the shoulder

just here through the bone again just tidy up any feathers you may see there that you don't want so now we can take the head off I usually just take it up close to the head just comes off usually very very easily like that so depending on the kind of knife you've got what steel it's made of you might not want to batten through bone you may be worried about chipping the edge of the blade or ruining the edge or dulling it very quickly it's never been something I've really worried about use 1095 carbon steel knives and se knives I've never had a blade chip on me through battling through bone obviously I bat them through very small bones on small game and just do it very quickly and very sharply and it generally just cut straight through without giving me a jagged break on the bone for me to potentially hurt myself a bit later but there are other ways of tackling bone if you can aim for joints for example if you don't with a baton through the same on this leg here I may not want to baton through some worried about edge retention on my blade and I don't dull it so you can just find the joint again and just aim for the joint and just go straight through the cartilage without worrying about dulling your blade at all so at this point we're left with something that looks quite a lot like what we find in the supermarket we've got the brass plate here we've got all the intestines and all the guts and the abdomen just here which we're going to remove in a second we've got the neck just there so what I generally do is find the base of the brass plate just here see it's quite flat and it changes suddenly and you can just run your knife just at that point there just through the fat

see there's a lot of fat on these ducks obviously you see you'll get to like a membrane just there you can just kind of work your way through that and you'll see you'll be opening up the gut cavity at the base just there all the gizzards all the guts will be up in there now you want to kind of make your way up the side of the breastplate slightly as well just to give you a bit more leverage on what you're about to do usually what I do is just pull one of the legs away just take it down through the leg slightly as well same the other side just like that and then you generally get a better idea of what you're working with so obviously just take your hand reach inside the duct just begin working out the organs there just like that you see that just here we've got the gizzard we've got the liver just there and up in here we've got the heart which is something else you can eat as well we're just going to spend some time tidying up this area here obviously it's a little bit of a mess we've got some clothing in there so we just want to get all of that out just make sure it's nice and clean you should just take this vent off at the back it's good mostly going to be going to be fat tearing you don't really want to eat that part you will have a little bit of bone to get through as well

it's not too much meat around the back end

I usually just spend a bit of time cleaning it up a bit it's making sure that area and in particular is it's nice and clean I never really mind losing a bit of fat or a tiny bit of meat around that area just you know it's a good peace of mind you just make sure the bird is nice and clean so when you're quite happy you've cleaned out the back end there I usually turn to the front you can see you can put your finger just down there it's in between the brass plate again just just in front of the throat of the bird eyes you just Nick that with my knife just so it's open we'll just open that up a bit he ducks over cut quite a lot of fat on them as you can see I'm just gonna take the throat out there you

remove any other gizzards that are inside the bird really I should be able to look straight through it it should be nice and clean inside it's always good to keep the liver of an animal just to inspect its health just see what kind of condition it was in looking for any white blemishes any discoloration this one doesn't look too bad really you want to dress a duck straightaway as soon as you've shot it especially if you're using a shotgun just in case you penetrate any of his vital organs such as you know like its digestive tract or its stomach you know there starts become a bit of contamination there and you sometimes see a bit of discoloration if you don't prepare the bird straight away and you leave it for a long time so don't worry too much about that it's really just any abnormalities you're looking for but the liver you can eat in certain parts of the world it is good to avoid the liver because of contamination you know like pollution and so on it's almost all birds have a gizzard and you can cut that gizzard open you'll see you have a sac basically on the inside that we full of grit and really everything that the bird has been eating some digested yet it's being broken down by bits of grit inside the gizzard and the gizzard is really just a huge muscle very very strong unlike a pigeon gizzard you can peel a sack off inside the gizzard quite easily but with a dark is a bit more difficult to peel off in a sack and just leave the muscle so if you do want to eat l'eglise it you may just want to use a knife to assist you just to kind of remove that lining on the inside there so you're left with the muscle if you want to sort of pan fry that but I'm not going to eat it today so depending on what you want from a bird it will really kind of govern the sort of technique you'll use there a techniques out there you can just tear out the piece you want and leave the rest and seems to be kind of like a trait that goes with all field dressing you know there's always so many ways of doing it which one is the best way well the best way is the one that works for you what do you want from the bird at the end of the day and that will govern the technique you will want to use so this is just a technique that uses the whole bird there are other techniques out there that you may want to have a look at but um maybe this will be useful to somebody out there obviously we've still got a lot of small little Tufts of feathers on this bird here and to get rid of those like I said there's a few different ways of doing it probably best to get rid of these before you do the rest of the process like gutting and opening it up because you can wax tip it and just tear it off like an eggshell of feathers or you can sort of scorch it off with a blowtorch I wrote over an open fire if I was camping I just burn those off on the fire and then roast it that way and the skin and all the fat will really add to the flavor but I'm going to keep some of the wing feathers because I've got a few things I want to make what's going to keep some of the down but perhaps next time I've got a few projects I'm looking into doing so if feathers like that can be quite useful but thanks for watching guys and you know appreciate you watching and hope the video helps out and you don't have any questions or any comments just you know leave them below and I'll get back to you soon as I can thanks again

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