Duck, Duck, Tandoor! (Wild Duck Tandoor)

A big thank you to Kathy Gori from The Colors of Indian Cooking for this recipe!

A note from Kathy:

A couple of weeks ago I set out to cook some wild ducks in my Homdoor Tandoori oven. I was “gifted” these ducks by a friend who hunts. He only eats the meat he occasionally hunts, he never shops for it and he got a couple of extra ducks that his family didn’t need, so he rang my doorbell. We don’t eat meat very often, mainly on Christmas, and Thanksgiving, so when I was looking for something that I could cook up in my  Homdoor Tandoor Oven those ducks were just quacking my name. 

There are a lot of game recipes in some of my older Indian cookbooks, where the chefs all start their bios by talking about getting “thrashed” as young kitchen boys by their stern taskmaster senior chefs. A lot of those books feature game, black partridge, red jungle fowl, quail, bar-headed goose, you get the picture. The only one I was familiar with was Quail as we have quite a covey of them living in our hedges, but these were wild ducks, Pin Tailed ducks to be precise, and I had one in my freezer courtesy of our friend. So Duck was what I decided to go with.

I’ve plucked, cleaned, and cooked wild duck before. My dad had a friend who hunted and he’d occasionally drop off a bird or two to the house and I’d go out into the back yard and get to work on them. I was about 13 at the time, no one else was willing to do it, so of course, I pulled an old wooden kitchen chair up onto the cement backyard, set down the San Francisco Chronicle around me like carpet and got to plucking. I’ll have to admit, cooking pre-cleaned, prepped and ready wild duck was a LOT easier and took a lot less time. All I had to do was make a tandoori marinade and let them sit overnight in it.

Cooking in the Homdor Tandoor is just like barbecuing except faster since the temperatures one cooks at are so high. Any tandoor dish can be grilled on a BBQ but the Tandoor is easier and faster and waaaay more authentic in flavor.  So here’s a simple marinade for wild duck which also works for chicken. It’s not as complicated as many tandoor marinades I’ve made but all the ingredients are easily found in your local market if you don’t already have them at home. So here goes!

Photo credit: Alan Berger