The famous cured duck of Dayu county — the old Nan'an prefecture — in the Hakka hills of southern Jiangxi. A mottled-feather duck is rubbed with coarse salt, pressed flat between boards into a rounded, peach-like shape, then air-dried for about two weeks through the cold dry winter. It is sold raw-cured, not cooked: milky-white of skin, deep sauce-brown at the lean, salty-fragrant with bones that crunch. To eat it you steam it whole and slice, or shave it into soup. Counted among China's four great pressed ducks.
Made at Dayu in the far south of Jiangxi, seat of the Ming-and-Qing Nan'an prefecture and a Hakka stronghold on the old road over the Meiling pass into Guangdong. The cure goes back to the Ming — sources put it at four to five centuries — and was first a plain coarse-salt pickle called 泡腌; the pressing into a neat peach-round shape with boards is the refinement that later earned it the name 板鸭, the 'board duck.' By a century ago it travelled the Cantonese trade routes as a keeping-food, sold down to Hong Kong, Macau and the Nanyang. Its making technique is a Jiangxi provincial intangible-cultural-heritage item (2011), and 'Nan'an Pressed Duck' was recognized a China Time-Honored Brand by the Ministry of Commerce in 2010.
Once steamed and sliced, the skin shows milky pale and the lean a deep sauce-brown, the two cleanly parted. The texture is firm, the bones thin enough to crunch, the tail end rich with fat. Flavor is salt and a matured fragrance — the lean sweet-savory, the fat warming rather than greasy. It is a keeping-food's taste: concentrated, clean, made to season a bowl of rice or lend its salt to a winter soup.
Curing is preservation by salt and air. The coarse-salt rub draws water out of the flesh and sets the color; pressing the bird flat between boards opens it thin and even so it dries through without souring at the bone. Then about two weeks of cold-season sun-and-dew drying lowers the water content until microbes can no longer take hold, while slow enzyme work in the cool weather deepens the savor and builds the matured aroma. The winter timing is the whole point: low temperature lets the salt penetrate and the duck dehydrate safely, where summer heat would spoil it before it could cure.
Variations
Dayu graders sort the finished ducks by silhouette into named grades — 'lion's mouth,' 'double dragon pearls,' 'broadsword shape' and the like. The bird is the local mottled or Dayu white duck, raised to a couple of kilos. It belongs to the same raw, dry-cured family as Nanjing's pressed duck, and differs from Nanjing salt-water duck, which is a low-temperature poached, ready-to-eat dish rather than a dried one; Anhui's Wuwei duck, by contrast, is smoked and braised, not salt-dried.
On the Palate
Where Nan'an Pressed Duck sits in the Chinese flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 6How it's made
4 steps · 30 min
- 1120 min
(The duck arrives already salt-cured, pressed and air-dried; these steps cook the finished bird.) Rinse the cured duck and soak in clean water for 1-2 hours to draw off excess salt.
Watch outSoak the cured duck 1–2 hours to draw off excess salt — skip it and the finished dish comes out punishingly salty.
- 240 min
Lay the whole duck in a dish with ginger and scallion, set in a steamer, and steam over high heat for about 40 minutes until cooked through.
Watch outSteam about 40 minutes until cooked through — the flesh is dense and dry-cured, so it needs the full time to turn tender.
- 35 min
Rest briefly, then chop bone-in into bite pieces and arrange on a plate.
- 430 min
Alternatively, shave a portion thin and add to a winter soup or claypot of vegetables to lend its cured salt and fragrance.
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