Unless you raise your own food or visit a farm regularly, it’s easy to forget just how fast things grow. A seed smaller than the head of a pin becomes a cabbage big enough to feed a family of 10. A duck that you can fit in the palm of your hand one minute is so big eight weeks later that you can barely get your arms around it.

The development itself is miraculous to watch, so it’s a shame that all you can see at the supermarket is the end product. When you are more closely connected to cycles of life, you’re more aware of what you’re consuming. It’s not protein, it’s an animal. Not a veggie, but a stunning armful of rainbow chard that will be gone in a blink.

Raising Poultry at Home

We were fortunate enough to visit a family in Truro, Massachusetts just days after they had received a shipment of white Pekin ducklings. While Tom Watson and his wife Francie Randolph had raised chickens for years, this was the first time they were trying their hand at ducks.

The birds arrived overnight, just days old, from a hatchery in Oregon. (Each of these 1/2-ounce fuzzies would grow, in only eight weeks, into a roughly 7.5-pound bird.) Ducks have well-oiled feathers and a thick coating of down, so are amazingly resistant to cold and wet weather. But these babies needed to be kept warm under a 250-watt heat lamp, and safe from predators. They took up residence in Tom’s office until housing on the ground could be completed and the outside temperature had warmed up a bit.

Leading a Duck to Water

While “like water off a duck’s back” is popular idiom, it turns out that ducks first need their oil gland to be activated with a good swim. The ducklings were still quite small and needed a way to get in and out of the water easily, so we helped Tom and Francie fashion a raised platform, covered with a towel, in their bathtub—thus providing the ducklings with a place to rest before they plunged back in.

After the swim, Tom organized the shed-like duck house. Ducks need adequate water, both for fun and hygiene (they clean their bills and eyes regularly). And because Tom watches what his family eats, he started by using organic feed from a New Hampshire supplier. Chickens, by comparison, may need supplemental feed too but are perfectly happy scratching around for grubs.

The Ducks Are Ready

Tom’s ducks were raised for meat rather than eggs, so they are butchered at the optimal age/weight for eating. Most of us are so removed from the reality of food production that the idea of butchering an animal can make us shaky.  But for people who raise animals, especially for their own consumption, butchering can be a serious, even solemn thing. They honor the animal by using every part; very little is wasted.

The dressed weight of the pekin ducks was four to six pounds. Tom followed a slightly bastardized version of a traditional French method, Caneton Roti or Roast Duckling, from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Tom’s idea of a perfect sauce for the duck consists of duck stock (made at butchering time from the necks and then frozen), cognac, homemade red currant jelly and sour cherries. But we non-farmers will be very happy—perhaps ecstatic—with this smoked duck recipe.

Tom also built his own smokehouse, and uses it for everything from Wellfleet oysters to salmon and duck. While you may not have your own smokehouse, slow cooking with a Weber grill and indirect heat should do the trick.

Tom served the duck with a green salad, fried Yukon Gold potatoes and carrots sautéed in duck fat and then caramelized with a teaspoon of brown sugar and a splash of bourbon.

Source for Ducklings

McMurrary Hatchery
Welp Hatchery
Metzer Farm