Sweet and Smoky Cured Duck Breast
Duck breast cured like bacon at home, smoked, sliced thin, and carried as trail meat.
- calories
- 210
- weight
- 2.5 oz
- cal / oz
- 84
- protein
- 19 g
- serves
- 6, scales
- prep
- 30 min
- cook
- 0 min
- total time
- 30 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Snack
- Lunch
- No cook
- Car camping
- Backpacking
- Basecamp
- Day hike
- Canoe / raft
- Gluten free
- Dairy free
- Nut free
- Eat in the bag
- Dehydrate ahead
- Needs a cooler
- Actual cooking
Ingredients
| Duck or goose breasts | 4 to 6 | skin on holds fat and flavor better |
|---|---|---|
| Kosher salt | 16 g per 624 g of meat | weigh the meat first, then scale |
| Instacure No. 1 | 1.6 g per 624 g of meat | measure on a gram scale, no eyeballing |
| Sweet sorghum, honey, or maple syrup | 1/2 cup | more if you are curing more than four breasts |
Method
- At home, weigh the breasts in grams and write the number down. Salt and cure are scaled off that weight, not off guesswork.
- Rub the salt, cure, and syrup over every surface. Lay the breasts in a glass or plastic dish, cover, and refrigerate several days, turning once a day.
- Rinse the cure off under cold water and pat the breasts dry. A few hours uncovered in the fridge gives the smoke something to stick to.
- Smoke low, around 200F, until the thickest breast reads 155F internal. Two hours is typical.
- Rest, then slice as thin as your knife allows. Chill fully before packing.
- In camp, open the bag and eat cold. Crackers, hard cheese, or a tortilla if you brought one.
This is bacon method applied to a bird. The salt and cure pull water out and fix the color, the syrup balances the salt, and the smoke does the rest. Everything that makes it work happens at home over several days, which is the point: what you carry is finished food that needs no stove, no water, and no pot.
Weigh the meat before you measure anything. Curing salt is dosed by weight of meat, and the 16 g salt / 1.6 g cure figures here are tied to 624 g of breast. Scale both up or down together. On the trail this is dense protein and fat in a small packet, but a cure and a smoke are not shelf stability, so it rides in a cooler or gets eaten in the first two days.
Packing
Vacuum seal in single-day portions and freeze them solid before the trip. Frozen packets double as cooler ice for the first day. Without a cooler, treat it as day-one or day-two food only.
Variations
- Swap the sorghum for maple syrup and add cracked black pepper to the cure.
- Goose breast takes the same cure ratio and the same smoke, just longer to temperature.
- Chop the scraps and ends into a rice or couscous dinner instead of eating them straight.
https://realtree.com/timber-2-table-wild-game-recipes/sweet-and-smoky-cured-duck-breast