<p>Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.</p>

Nicholas Gavin

<p>The great poultry conundrum: how to cook a bird with juicy meat and crispy skin? Traditional methods require that you sacrifice one for the other. We get around this dilemma in our sous vide duck recipe by dividing and conquering. We cook a skinless duck breast sous vide until it’s juicy and tender. The skin is tackled separately, using an ingenious technique that we call cryo-grinding. The duck skin is frozen solid in a bath of liquid nitrogen, which leaves it very brittle. We then pulverize it to a powder in a blender, then cook it down in a saucepan to create a fine crumble of browned, flavorful, crisp skin. It goes great on just about anything, including as garnish for our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/duck-breast-beet-and-chocolate">Duck Breast, Beet, and Chocolate dish</a>. </p>

Duck Breast 135 °F and Duck Skin Crumble