Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Scott Leysath, DU Magazine cooking columnist, joins host Chris Jennings on this episode to share his five favorite waterfowl recipes. A few of these recipes may surprise you.

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Creators and Guests

Writer
Chris Jennings
DUPodcast Contributor

What is Ducks Unlimited Podcast?

Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.

VO:

Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast, Reloaded. We bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In Reloaded, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong.

VO:

So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.

Chris Jennings:

Today, I've got Ducks Unlimited magazine cooking columnist, and sporting chef, and host of Dead Meat, Scott Leysath. Scott, thanks for joining us today.

Scott Leysath:

Good to be here, man.

Chris Jennings:

Awesome. Well, we're gonna go ahead and kick this off. We're gonna get right into it, so because this is gonna be a little bit of a longer one than we've done in the past. Your five favorite waterfowl recipes. You did this as a feature in Ducks Unlimited magazine a few years back, and it has just been wildly popular.

Chris Jennings:

People are always interested to see your favorite waterfowl recipes, and most of them have become theirs, I'm I'm assuming. But, yeah, can you kind of explain where you came up with this list of five, these specific recipes?

Scott Leysath:

You know, I'm not a real foodie, and I'm not trying to out chef anybody. I really like recipes that that everybody will enjoy. So I I kinda lean towards Southwestern when it's personal. You know, these are my five favorite waterfowl recipe. You know, I think the number one one on there, the one that I started off with, and they're really in no particular order, is tamales.

Scott Leysath:

A lot of people, their only experience with tamales is the one that comes in the can that's wrapped with a little piece of paper around it. It's about about the size of a cigar. You know, they're kind of like tamales. They have a little moss in there, but what's cool about tamales is you can take you can take snow geese, big Canada geese, some of the lesser ducks, and braise them. So however you wanna get them soft and tender. So by that, let's say you take the ducks, split them in half, put them into a roasting pan with some celery, carrot, onion, little bit of liquid in there, cover them up with foil.

Scott Leysath:

In several hours, that's all gonna come right off the bone. You're gonna season it with whatever you like to put in your tamales. I like a little, you know, onion, chili powder, the seasoning. I put some enchilada sauce in there. And the thing about tamales, the flour the masa flour is what is kind of mysterious for people, and it's just it's basically masa flour, which for $3, you can buy a giant bag that'll last forever, a little warm lard, or some other kind of shortening.

Scott Leysath:

You can use any kind of liquid shortening, some chicken broth, and salt. And all you're gonna do is turn that into something that's about the consistency of wet cookie dough. Take a corn house that you've soaked in water for thirty minutes, and you can do anything. You can pack anything into that tamale. If you get an assembly

Scott Leysath:

line going where you've got the guys starting with the the wet corn husk, then you put a little the the masa filling in there or the tamale filling, wrap it up, put it over in the next deal, you steam it. And then what I like to do is if I'm gonna steam them, let them cool, and then I'm gonna vacuum seal them and put them in the freezer so that I've got them. They're a big, big hit at the holiday season.

Chris Jennings:

Yeah. That's great. And then you can just pop them right out if you have guests coming over and you're you're serving duck or goose tamales. That's awesome.

Scott Leysath:

Right. And it's, you know, the same thing with the duck toast. One of those, it's that shredded meat that you know, it's what's good about doing the low and slow method, whether it's in a crock pot or a sous vide or the shredded meat, is that you get a really good yield. You're not just doing what a lot of people do and dressing out their ducks and throwing the rest away. You set up a tostada farmer. You've got your seasoned shredded meat. Let everybody put their own toppings on there, and it's and you get a crunchy corn tortilla to build it on, man. You know, it's very, very simple. I think we did the mango and potato duck poppers, which is which is my take on the on the standard duck popper.

Scott Leysath:

What a lot of people do that I found with wild game is they'll put their ducks, geese, deer, whatever, into little strips and marinate it for a long time, wrap it with jalapeno, bacon, and cream cheese, and it tastes really good. And it's usually the first thing if that's and a a

Scott Leysath:

duck treat is usually the first thing to go. But for a lot of people, the victory is that it doesn't taste like duck. And I like my duck taste

Scott Leysath:

like duck, so mine is not marinated. It's for more than a couple

Scott Leysath:

of hours. It's not forty eight hours in teriyaki. The mango gets a little bit of

Scott Leysath:

a sweet bite, and then the prosciutto on the outside, you get that nice and crispy. You've got the jalapeno in the center to give it

Scott Leysath:

some heat. So you've got sweet from the mango. You've got heat from the jalapeno and

Scott Leysath:

salt from

Scott Leysath:

the prosciutto. Really, really good.

Chris Jennings:

Yeah. That that's one of our top red. I think you've done that as a column in the past

Scott Leysath:

We did.

Chris Jennings:

Years ago, and it was it's wildly popular.

Scott Leysath:

It was worth repeating, so that's why I wanted to put it. It's it's always been one of my favorite. The sweet jalapeno duck is a really, really good marinade that gives you you've got orange juice concentrate, which is one of the things that I use in place of sugar as a sweetener in a recipe. You know, basically, juice concentrate is sugar anyway, but it just has flavor. So for the marinade, it's water, orange juice concentrate, a little vinegar for sour.

Scott Leysath:

There's some vegetable oil oil in there. And what's good about putting oil into your marinade is that if you've got a lot of acidic ingredients like vinegar and orange juice, what'll very what'll often happen with a piece of meat is that the marinade will start to cook it. And if you've ever soaked chicken or pheasant or whatever in a acidic marinade, it gets kinda mushy. So that's why the oil will help protect that. It's gonna give it flavor.

Scott Leysath:

The jalapeno lime, I mean and and and I prefer to put this one on a grill. And, you've got you've got sweet, you've got spicy, and then throwing it on a grill makes it that much better. In that recipe, the the that marinade works on just about any anything.

VO:

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Chris Jennings:

Now you kinda lean towards a lot. You you lean you lean towards a lot of spicy. You know, you kinda add quite a bit more spice than what you see from other people. Is that something that you kinda came up with or is it some it's just like a personal preference?

Scott Leysath:

You know, my spice is usually a mild spice. For instance, I'll use jalapeno. Mhmm. As opposed to habanero.

Scott Leysath:

And the good thing about if you're not into spice and you see one of

Scott Leysath:

my recipes that's got peppers in it or hot peppers, leave it out. Leave it out or use less. You know, recipes are meant to be outlawing.

Scott Leysath:

It's not what I think tastes great,

Scott Leysath:

you can adjust at the end and make it your own. It kills me when you look at

Scott Leysath:

when you watch some of

Scott Leysath:

the stuff on the Food Network, and it's all competition. Yeah. And you've got these three three or four annoying people

Scott Leysath:

that are giving you the thumbs up or the thumbs down

Scott Leysath:

on whether your recipe is worthy or not. Heck, it's your recipe. If you don't if you don't like garlic, don't put garlic in the recipe. I happen to like garlic. But if you leave it out, nobody's gonna come and arrest you.

Scott Leysath:

Yeah. It's entirely your recipe. My my really, here's a recipe that I learned, one of the top five when I we were in South Africa. Every piece of meat for twenty four hours was soaked in olive oil, garlic, sometimes rosemary, salt, and pepper. Olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper for the most part.

Scott Leysath:

Some put a little splash of soy sauce in there. They marinate the meat for twenty four hours, cook it over a hot smoky grill till it's rare to medium rare, and the stuff is, like, incredible. It's buttery. It tastes just like it's supposed to taste. It doesn't taste gamey.

Scott Leysath:

And if you just don't cook it so long, most

Scott Leysath:

of the game that you eat won't taste gamey at all.

Chris Jennings:

Man, the olive oil, garlic, rosemary, I mean, that's just a basic I mean, everyone has that probably in their spice cabinets and cabinets. I mean, that's just a basic marinade or in in and very, very easy to do. Yeah. Before we let you go, I do wanna touch on marinades real quick, and and mainly because I've heard you say this before. Most of the people you talk to or have talked to in the past, I mean, people I know as well, their first step in the process of cooking ducks is to throw it in Italian dressing.

Scott Leysath:

Well, you know what mean? And the Italian dressing is really not a bad idea, and

Scott Leysath:

it's it's not a bad place to start. Some of the, you know, the prepared level of things

Scott Leysath:

to me are either too salty or too kind

Scott Leysath:

of you know, they have ingredients in

Scott Leysath:

there for for stability and those kind of things. I would rather I would rather make my own Italian dressing, like, with olive oil, a good

Scott Leysath:

a good vinegar, some garlic, maybe a little red wine, and some herbs. I think you'll find that that tastes better than what you get out of the bottle, and it'll probably be infinitely less salty. You know, they they

Scott Leysath:

shouldn't marinade should enhance, not disguise what your what your game tastes like. If you take

Scott Leysath:

so you have half cup each lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, honey. Half cup each. Throw in some red wine, a little soy sauce. I'll give it some salt, some garlic, rosemary. I like to put a little mustard in a marinade. If you wanna put red pepper flakes in there for

Scott Leysath:

heat, that's cool. After that's all in there while you're whisking, you add the olive oil in a really thin stream, and that will emulsify it so that you have this really that's great marinade that you may have to shake up a little bit. But you'll notice that that Italian dressing that you have, that bottle, nothing really separates in there because it's got all this other stuff in there like guar gum and zamzam gum. The binders. So that everything all the binders.

Scott Leysath:

Yeah. Whereas if you just whip it with olive oil to me and emulsify it that way, that's the better part.

Chris Jennings:

Can you marinate things too long?

Scott Leysath:

You can. And as I mentioned before, when especially if you've got acidic ingredients in there like vinegar, citrus juice, wine, things like that, that will actually if you leave it in

Scott Leysath:

there too long, it's gonna make the meat mushy. I highly recommend a brine first. A saltwater brine if you take a half gallon of water to a half cup each of kosher salt and

Scott Leysath:

brown sugar. Do the brine first. After it's been brined, pat it dry, and then put it in the marinade. And, of course, since the brine has salt in it, you wanna cut back a little bit on the salt on the marinade or rub. But I start there, then I do a marinade or just toss it right on the grill.

Scott Leysath:

But my very often the actually, always, the first step that I do is I grind my vegetables.

Chris Jennings:

Well, hey. I appreciate it, Scott. Thanks for the insight. I'm sure everyone picked up a little bit of knowledge here. We'll be sure to have you back on.

Chris Jennings:

We'll probably get back into brines and marinades again, but I do appreciate you coming. Thank you.

Scott Leysath:

Yeah, man.

Chris Jennings:

I wanna give a special thanks to Scott Laceeth, our guest, for joining us. If you wanna learn more about Scott, you can visit the sportingchef.com or check out his recipes on ducks.org. I also wanna give a special thanks to Clay Baird, the Ducks Unlimited podcast producer who puts this awesome show together. I'm your host, Chris Jennings. Thanks for joining us, and thanks for supporting Welland's Conservation.

VO:

Thank you for listening to the DU podcast, sponsored by Purina Pro Plan, the official performance dog food of Ducks Unlimited. Purina Pro Plan, always advancing. Also proudly sponsored by Bird Dog Whiskey and Cocktails. Whether you're winding down with your best friend or celebrating with your favorite crew, Bird Dog brings award winning flavor to every moment. Enjoy responsibly.

VO:

Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ducks.org/dupodcast. Opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect those of Ducks Unlimited. Until next time, stay tuned to the Ducks.