JOURNAL: Gingered Duck (Cookies)

The classic Swedish holiday cookie involves two of my all-time favorite ingredients, neither of which I usually associate with cookies, or each other. The appearances, flavors, aromas and textures of ginger and bacon fat seem so diametrically opposed that I was both horrified and intrigued by the thought of combining them into one sticky biscuit.

It works. It works as well as I imagined it possibly could, and the flavor and texture of these cookies is hard to rival, but I thought I might be able to come up with a little trick to make it work even better, a twist to put it over the top, and that got me thinking about other favorite fats and ginger dishes, and it all fell right into place.

Rendered duck fat is probably the most amazing thing on Earth, up there with Bose-Einstein Condensate as a substance that both perplexes and amazes me, so impossible to wrap my head around how it can do what it does. I have found that in the kitchen, anything that benefits from a richly flavored fat like bacon grease can become ten times more tantalizing when substituted with rendered duck fat. Ginger duck dishes also work very well in Asian cuisine, so I think I might just have devised a winner.

Experiments will follow soon and I will update with a recipe and results in an impending posting.