Why this is a craft, not a dish
Roast duck in Beijing is not one recipe. It is two lineages and about twenty separate decisions before a single slice leaves the board. The closed-oven school - sometimes called the sealed oven - never lets flame touch the bird: the oven is heated, the fire is drawn, the door is shut, and the duck cooks in the stored heat of the brick. The open-oven school hangs the bird inside a mouth-open oven over a fruit-wood fire, usually jujube or pear, and turns it by hand. One gives a soft, faintly glossy skin and a very moist bird; the other gives a thin, brittle, crackling skin with smoke in it. Both techniques are on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage, and that is the level at which this day treats them.
Morning - the dressing, before anything is cooked
We start where the flavour is actually decided. A Beijing duck is a purpose-bred bird with a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, and almost everything else is done to manage that fat. Your host walks you through the sequence the old kitchens used: air pumped between skin and flesh to lift the two apart, then the cavity opened and cleaned without piercing the skin, then the hook, then boiling water poured over the outside to tighten it, then a coating of maltose syrup, then the drying - the bird hung in moving air until the skin is dry and papery, because a skin with moisture in it will never crisp.
Lunch
A lunch of northern dishes, keeping the appetite for the evening.
Afternoon - the oven room
Then the fire. You watch a bird go in and come out, which is the part that cannot be explained in print: how the cook reads a colour rather than a clock, how the cavity is filled with boiling water just before hanging so that the duck steams from the inside while it roasts from the outside, and why the breast - thinner-skinned - goes nearer the door and the back further in. We talk about fuel as well: why fruit wood and not coal, what it contributes, and what a modern kitchen has had to substitute.
Evening - the carving and the table
The last act is at the table itself. A properly carved duck is cut skin-and-flesh together into slices roughly the size of a clove - small, uniform, and served hot enough that you go through them faster than you expect. You eat it rolled in thin pancakes with scallion, cucumber and sweet bean sauce. Then the rest of the bird comes back as a milky soup made on its bones. In a full banquet, the duck reappears in dozens of forms - the pluck, the liver, the wings, the tongue, the web - and that whole table is called a duck banquet. We finish with the soup and a short explanation of how the two schools differ in the mouth, so you can order knowingly afterwards rather than asking for roast duck and hoping.
Meals
Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
