What Do You Smoke In Your Kitchen?

Today I did something I've never done before.  I smoked a duck.  You know that scene in Julia and Julia where she's scared of boning a duck?  That's how I felt about this task.

For the dinner I'm hosting tomorrow night, I found a wonderful idea for a salad with smoked duck on top.  I LOVE duck.  It's one of my favorite proteins.  I've cooked it many times with great results.  The only thing is, you can't but it already smoked so I would have to do it myself.  The other thing is, I don't have a smoker.  Now I've seen things be smoked on the stovetop before at a restaurant I interned in.  However, I couldn't give up that much oven space on a massive prep day, so I hit up Google on how to do it in the oven.

Surprisingly, it didn't sound that hard and even more surprisingly, it wasn't that hard.  It does take a good amount of time, so plan ahead, but that's the only complication to this method.  You'll only need a few things:

1 duck
an aluminum pan
hickory wood chips
a baking rack

1 - Put the wood chips in the aluminum pan and soak in water for 1-2 hours. 
2 - Preheat your oven to 250 degrees.
2 - Season the outside of the duck as desired.  I used a wonderful salt mix that I bought at a local spice shop.  The key is to make sure your seasoning has a high salt content so it soaks into the skin during the cooking process.
3 - Drain the wood chips leaving 2-3 T of water in the pan.  Place the pan of wood chips in the oven and lay the baking rack on top.  Put the duck on top of the rack and cover with aluminum foil.  Cook 4-6 hours until the internal temperature of the duck reaches 140 degrees. 

4 - Crave and serve as desired

Hungry for more?  Wait until you see what I did with this duck...