Rucheng Pressed Salted Duck 汝城板鸭

Rucheng Pressed Salted Duck (汝城板鸭) is a duck cured with salt and dried in the open air in Rucheng County (汝城县), Chenzhou (郴州). Red Net's Chenzhou edition describes making it as a folk tradition kept up for more than four hundred years.

How it is made

Long Hai (龙海), who heads a board-duck farmers' cooperative in Rucheng County, told Red Net that his cooperative usually chooses the local ma duck (麻鸭) for its firm meat and moderate fat, and that birds raised for about 100 days are the right age for board duck. The cure is plain: coarse salt only, then natural drying in sun and breeze, with no preservatives. Over roughly half a month of drying the meat slowly tightens and begins to give off glistening fat.

Where it comes from

The making is a winter job. In Zhuling Yao village (祝岭瑶族村), Daping town (大坪镇), households hang rows of drying ducks under the eaves, and the air smells salty and savoury; Red Net calls the scene one of the area's distinctive winter sights. Local villagers describe the finished duck as the winter taste they know best.