Greg and Jodi Clarke’s Just Duck is the duck bible
Greg and Jodi Clarke’s Just Duck is a high-end, self-published combo of stories, recipes and sound duck info.
On the southwest coast of Victoria, near the Twelve Apostles and the Great Ocean Road, farmland made rich by regular rain is often a luscious green sprinkled with black and white Friesian cattle. This is renowned dairy country and these distinctive cows are almost as common as the swells that pound the coastal cliffs.
But on our small 16ha farm, on a hill overlooking the Southern Ocean and the coastal village of Port Campbell, there are Aylesbury and Pekin ducks in the paddocks. My wife, Jodi, and I sell weekly batches of our Great Ocean Ducks (or GOD for short) to a clutch of highly regarded restaurants in Melbourne and country Victoria.
We’ve lived on our farm for about 12 years. Initially we raised a few beef cattle and sold them at local saleyards, but we soon figured out that the meat buyers who bought our cattle were the ones making most of the money. Around the same time we realised our rich land could be far more productive than it was. We had only one caveat on what we might do: it couldn’t be fashionable; we didn’t want to buy into a fad.
At that time, Jodi worked as a mum and I had a fulltime writing gig. Both of us were drawn into what we see as a broader revolution: a good-food movement where animal welfare is as important as how the animal tastes after its transformation into food.
After considering dozens of options, Jodi came up with the idea to farm ducks (quite from where I have no idea). It was a radical leap from thought bubbles about growing saffron or wasabi, or rearing dairy calves.
After some research, we decided to first try farming Aylesbury ducks. We were lured by their historical connection: this duck was wildly popular in 19th-century England as a table bird. It also has rare-breed status, which was a bonus.
We bought our first 30 infant Aylesbury ducks in 2009 and transported them home in the family car. We had no previous experience with ducks and learnt our first lesson on the four-hour trip home: ducks are gold-medal shitters. The smell from the cardboard boxes the ducks were in skewered our nostrils.
In the shed we built for them, we somehow kept the ducks alive and slowly (almost) grew used to their smell. We watched them grow, amazed that we didn’t inadvertently kill even one. Later, when we did meat trials on some drakes, we found it hard to kill birds we had miraculously kept alive, so I called on a local, a real farmer, to butcher and help pluck the first ones. We shared those ducks with him, his wife and other friends.
We didn’t try anything fancy when cooking them, only roasted them, but even then Jodi and I were nervous. We were desperate for them to taste good and to do justice to the birds, partly because we wanted our friends to see that it might not have been a completely crazy decision to farm ducks.