Easy peasy grilled duck tacos with an easy to make orange salsa naranja.

Grilled Duck Tacos with Salsa Naranja

By Sue Lau | Palatable  Pastime

Welcome back to  #CookoutWeek! Sorry that a couple of my non-sponsored posts  got sidelined- things came up. But I am happy to be back with  this one.

These duck  tacos are the perfect easy cookout recipe. I know. I know.  I suspect you are thinking “What? Easy duck? No freaking way!” But for this recipe I am using some precooked duck halves that were sent along by the sponsor Maple Leaf Farms. It makes grilling these as easy as cooking hot dogs. And weenies on the grill  are very ordinary,  while  duck is not. Most people think of Duck ala Orange, the classic French preparation. And indeed, the duck I was sent came packed with the  orange sauce, but that wasn’t what I used.

Not that I don’t like orange sauce, because I do. But right now I am eating more low sugar, so would not be having that sauce, since it does have sugar in it.

They also graciously  sent along several other duck items which I will get around to using and share those recipes with you at a later date. I’d love to make some duck leg confit and also use that bacon in a nice cassoulet as soon as the weather breaks. Keep an eye out for it.

However, I was interested in the duck/orange combination and since I thought tacos sounded like a great idea once grilled duck would catch some smoke flavor on the grill, opted to make a cooked salsa with salsa naranja, which I made from naranja agria (or sour orange juice) which you  can easily find in a Mexican market. However, if you can’t, you can probably approximate that with some orange juice mixed with grapefruit juice or lemon juice. But it is not very sweet at all,  and barely has carbs in it, if any. (If you made with fresh oranges, carbs would definitely be there). I think you can also order it online,  several brands make it for sure, including Badia and La Preferida.

You can  see how nice it looks from the tomatoes and peppers with just a hint of orange color. The  naranja agria is not deeply colored- it is light, and looks like pineapple juice.

This is the plate of things I grilled up (tortillas,  duck, and some shishito/padron peppers). I wasn’t planning on the peppers per se, but I had just picked them out of the garden  that day (I grow lots of peppers  and herbs, plus a few other things like tomatoes, eggplant,  zucchini, and snap peas) and since I was firing up the grill anyway, threw them into the mix. There isn’t much to it  at all- just grill them until they blister, then drizzle with lime juice and salt. Most people will mention the salt. I am telling you lime juice too, so trust me please.

Another way to do grilled peppers is with hotter ones. Shishito peppers are generally very mild, about like banana peppers without vinegar tang. Except occasionally one decides to  be fiery. So that can be a fun surprise. But if you do like spicier, jalapeno and serrano peppers  grill up gorgeously in quite the same way (and it is how I  learned to put lime juice on peppers). The hotter ones are called chiles toreados. Some people will tell you that means simply roasted peppers, but that’s not exactly it. It means peppers of bullfighting, or perhas that eating them makes you brave and feisty like a bullfighter (or toreador). And believe me, in the summer, when peppers are at their spiciest, chomping down a roasted hot pepper all the way to the stem can be as daunting as facing down a charging bull. Shishitos are much kinder and gentler.

You will see the duck skin on these got nicely browned and crisp on the grill, which you can easily do without much culinary skill. Maple Leaf Farms has done all  the heavy lifting getting the duck ready for you and from there, grilling it is as easy as throwing a hot dog on the bbq. The skin will crisp to perfection and the duck is nice and moist without being greasy. It  is quite like a rotisserie chicken straight off the spit.

It’s very easy  to pull from the bone  and do a chiffonade cut on it the same way you would the cabbage so it is nice and thin.

The flavor of the tacos is very authentic and you will feel like you are in a taqueria enjoying it the way it has been made since time began. Pure delight.

Oh  and if you are low carbing, you can switch the corn tortillas out if you prefer to a low carb flour tortilla, I just probably would skip oiling those before tossing on the grill since they won’t need it. They will probably get better grill marks than the corn ones.

Don’t forget to scroll below the recipe print to get the link to enter the giveaway (which is on my Hawaiian Hot Dog / Welcome to #CookoutWeek post) and the blue link  opens the linkup to the other bloggers participating today. Normally you see the linkups open in the blog, but I use an external link with this host. Good luck in the giveaway!

~s

Welcome  back to Cookout Week!

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Disclaimer: While the sponsors have generously provided for the raffle giveaway prizes

and complimentary product for recipe development, all opinions in this post are my own.