A salt-cured, air-dried duck from Nanjing, pressed flat into a board-like slab — a true cured "la" duck, not to be confused with the city's fresh, wet-brined salt-water duck. The bird is rubbed with roasted salt, brined in old curing liquor, then dried until the flesh sets firm and the skin turns pale and taut. It is sold dry and keeps for months; you boil or steam it before slicing it cold to eat. The result is white-skinned and rose-fleshed, intensely savory-fragrant, with bones gone tender enough to chew. Nanjing has made it for some six hundred years.
Nanjing pressed duck is said to have originated in Hushu, on the city's outskirts, and to have some six centuries of history. In the Ming and Qing it was offered up as a court tribute, which earned it the names "tribute duck" (贡鸭) and "ceremonial-gift pressed duck" (官礼板鸭) — local officials would pick the finest birds for the throne, and exchanged them as gifts on visits. Its standing is fixed in an old Jinling folk rhyme praising the city's treasures: "the old academy, the porcelain pagoda; the dark satin, the salted pressed duck" (古书院，琉璃塔；玄色缎子，咸板鸭) — the duck named in the same breath as the National Academy, the great glazed-tile pagoda of the Bao'en Temple, and Nanjing's famous black brocade, which marks it as a celebrated local product by the Ming at the latest. The trade splits the year into "la-board duck," cured from Major Snow to the Start of Spring, and "spring-board duck," cured from the Start of Spring to Qingming.
Boiled and sliced cold, the meat is dense and chewy rather than soft — firm fibres that pull cleanly, deeply salted and carrying the round, faintly fermented fragrance of a properly cured bird. The skin is pale and thin, the cut flesh a glistening rose-pink, and the bones are cured soft enough to gnaw. This is the opposite of salt-water duck's plump, juicy tenderness: pressed duck is concentrated and savory, a slow cured taste meant to be eaten in thin slices, often with wine.
Pressed duck is built by salt, time, and drying — a dry-cure, a wet-cure, and a slow air-dry stacked together. Salt is first dry-roasted with fennel and ground fine; about six percent of the bird's weight goes on, three-quarters packed into the cavity through the neck and a quarter rubbed over the skin. After roughly twelve hours of dry-salting the carcass is hung to drain the cavity brine (a step called "hooking the liquor"), then re-stacked for a second eight-hour drain and a re-cure in old liquor mixed with Sichuan pepper, five-spice, sugar, and a trace of saltpetre. The bird is then splayed flat on a crossed bamboo brace, pressed into its board shape, and dried until firm. The saltpetre matters chemically: its nitrate breaks down to nitrite, which binds the meat's heme to form nitrosyl-heme — the stable rose-pink that survives cooking — while also curbing fat oxidation and building the distinctive cured-meat aroma. The traditional verse names every lever: "the duck must be fat, fed on rice; cure it with roasted salt, re-cure it in clear liquor; dry it through, rest it through — white skin, red flesh, tender bone."
Variations
The main split is seasonal: "la-board duck" cured in the depth of winter is prized as firmer and finer, while spring-board duck is cured later, into the warming weeks before Qingming. Nanjing pressed duck stands apart from the city's fresh salt-water duck (wet-brined, eaten moist) and from the other famous boards of China — Jiangxi's Nan'an, Anhui's smoke-cured Wuwei. Once cooked, it is most often sliced as a cold platter; the same cured bird is also simmered into winter soups with bamboo shoots or salt pork, where it lends a deep cured savour.
On the Palate
Where Nanjing Pressed Duck sits in the Chinese flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 4
How it's made
8 steps · 1 hour
- 140 min
Choose a plump duck, ideally grain-fed; pluck and clean it, remove the innards, cut off the wing tips and feet, split it open from the breast, rinse, and hang to drip dry.
- 220 min
Dry-roast salt with fennel and grind fine; rub the bird with roughly six percent of its weight in salt, packing about three-quarters into the cavity through the neck and a quarter over the skin.
Watch outPack about three-quarters of the salt into the cavity through the neck and a quarter on the skin — the inside is thickest and needs the most cure.
- 3720 min
Stack the salted ducks in a crock and dry-cure for about twelve hours.
- 4480 min
Hang the duck to drain off the cavity brine ("hook the liquor"), then re-stack and drain a second time over about eight hours.
Watch outHang to drain the cavity brine before re-curing — leaving that first brine in dilutes the second cure and the flavor stays shallow.
- 530 min
Re-cure in old liquor mixed with Sichuan pepper, five-spice, sugar, and a trace of saltpetre, keeping it submerged.
- 65760 min
Brace the duck open on crossed bamboo strips, press it into its flat board shape, and air-dry in a cool, airy place until the flesh sets firm — several days.
Watch outPress flat on the crossed bamboo and air-dry until the flesh sets firm — several days; rush it and the meat stays soft and won't slice clean.
- 790 min
To eat, soak the dried duck, then poach or steam it gently with ginger, scallion, and Shaoxing wine until cooked through and the bones turn tender.
- 810 min
Cool, then slice thinly across the grain and arrange as a cold platter.
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