Hakka sour plum duck

A family dish for the new year

Sour plum duck is a whole duck braised in a covered pot on a bed of sliced onions with pickled plums and Chinese plum sauce. The Woks of Life presents it as a Hakka classic: Bill Leung remembers it as the special dish his father cooked on Chinese New Year's Day, which the children later asked for on ordinary days too. He says he rebuilt the recipe from childhood memory and filled gaps by taste and educated guessing, so it is a family reconstruction, not an inherited or verified formula. He also suggests the dish might be the source of the name duck sauce, since the sauce looks like plum sauce. That is his guess and not a documented history.

How the braise works

The duck is salted and rubbed with white pepper and ginger, then rested for 30 minutes so the seasoning reaches the meat. Searing in a hot pot browns the skin before any liquid goes in. The aromatics, shallots, garlic and a large amount of onion, are softened in the same pot so they pick up the browned fat.

The sauce is built from pickled plums, which are sour and salty, plum sauce, which is sweet with a little sourness, chicken stock, dried citrus peel for its bitter aroma and a spoonful of rice vinegar. The duck goes in breast side down for the first hour so the breast sits in the liquid, then is turned for a second stage and finally left uncovered for 15 minutes. Over those hours the onions break down and the sauce reduces to what the author calls a thick onion marmalade. The cook is told to judge the end by tenderness and to add stock or reduce the sauce to bring it to the right consistency, since duck size and pot shape change how much liquid is lost.

The plum sauce, and what else carries the name

Chinese plum sauce (su mei jiang, 苏梅酱 or 蘇梅醬, spelled both ways on jars) is a mostly sweet sauce with a slight sourness. Recipes and brands differ: the Woks of Life glossary notes that it may be made from plums and sometimes apricots or pineapple. One jar lists sugar, rice vinegar, salted plums, ginger and salted garlic and chillies. Lee Kum Kee's Su Mei Sauce lists sugar, salted plums, water, rice vinegar, modified corn starch, ginger, citric acid, sodium citrate, chilli and xanthan gum, and the company recommends it with roast duck and other meats. These are prepared sauces, and the sources give no single standard recipe.

The name can mislead. Salted or pickled plums and a smooth sweet-sour plum sauce are not the same product, even though the sauce is made with salted plums, and this dish uses both. The sauce is also compared to the packet duck sauce served with takeout, which the glossary says is less flavourful because of corn syrup and artificial colouring; the comparison is a faint one, and the sources do not show that the two share a history. The Michelin Guide repeats a historical preservation association for plum sauce but gives no primary citation, so the sauce's earliest record is open. No source gives a tested shelf life for a homemade plum sauce; bought jars are refrigerated once opened.