Peking Duck in Beijing

Sorry for the long hiatus. Posting pictures on Blogspot is such a pain at times, and formatting can be quite annoying at times. Also, I have a full day-to-day schedule and I don't have as much time as I would like to blog.

In any case...I just got back last week from Beijing where I went on a one-week trip with family, which was overall very fun, as my friends on Facebook can likely see evidenced in my 2 album's worth of pictures (believe me, there were a lot more but I got tired of rotating all the photos manually).

The day that we arrived in Beijing, my mom's relatives took us to Da Dong Restaurant, which specialized in Peking Duck (as a lot of restaurants in Beijing claim to). Even though I've had Peking Duck multiple times, the Peking Duck in Beijing was totally different (as what you would likely expect). It was very...interactive.

First of all, when you order a Peking Duck, the restaurant tells you to go inside the kitchen and pick your own duck from their roasting ovens. Even if I didn't know how to pick ducks, I volunteered for this challenge (but picked wrong, because the people in the kitchen ended up picking another one for me).

Secondly, the condiments were much more...abundant than normal. Normally, the Peking Duck I've had comes with hoisin sauce (brown stuff), leeks (white stalks), and cucumbers (light green stalks), so I personally found the addition of condiments such as white sugar, red radish, white radishy sauce and the 2 "unknown" things at the bottom left of the plate (pickled plums and pickled radish I think) interesting.

Below is the guy who was cutting up our duck tableside.

Peking Duck was pretty good. Like I said, I've had it several times before, but there was just something very different about this duck. The skin (which we were told to dip in the white sugar crystals) was crisp and not that greasy; its combination with the sugar allowed a beautiful harmony of textures to be created--crispy skin with crunchy sugar crystals. Moreover, I've always been a bit partial to the pairing of salty things with sweet things, and this was a good example of that.

As you can see in Kei's picture below, her plate has 2 kinds of Peking Duck--one being the "crepe" style, and the other being the "bread-cracker" style.

Traditionally (according the the waitress who demonstrated for the entire table), these are the condiments that go with each "style"--

crepe style (below on her plate): duck, leeks, hoisin sauce

bread-cracker style (top one on her plate): duck, white radish sauce, red radish, cucumber

I really liked both ways of Peking Duck...eating, because overall, the duck was lean and tender (though a bit dry). What made it superior in comparison to all the other duck I've eaten is that the crepe that they served as a wrap for the duck was exceptionally good. In the past, I've eaten wrappers that are more floury and dry (thus also breaking easily while you ate the duck), but this one in particular was soft, chewy and held up quite well when you wrapped the duck. In any case, yum. Kei's face says it all.

*Side Note: am not going to go into detail about all the other food we ate at this restaurant because (given that this is China), there was just SO MUCH OF IT. It was all very delicious though, and included things like traditional Beijing snacks, deer and a milky, slightly acidic fish soup. Sadly, no remnants apart from memories (and body fat) remain of these.