For a long time I'd been flirting with the idea of making oven roasted duck with cabbage. Still, I'd been avoiding getting into a more sophisticated and complex recipe for the sake of convenience. However, the craving was greater so I came up with a variant of mine, for lazy people, starting from the idea that "the duck must sit on the cabbage!" First of all, pick the right duck meat. In our family, when there is a whole duck, there is always fighting over the thighs. Now I prefer to buy only thighs and everyone is at peace. You can combine sauerkraut with fresh cabbage or use just one of them, depending on how sour you like it. Then, I only used basic spices (I tried to use thyme but it seemed to completely cover the taste of meat and everything else, so adjust to taste). I focused on baking it in the oven - for 2 hours, not just to be cooked through, but also baked, with that special "wow" taste. You see, the charm and the special taste are not from the spices, they come precisely from the fact that the cabbage was roasted in the juice and the fat from the duck.
And yes, the duck on the cabbage was perfect, extraordinary even! The cabbage is cooked in the fat released by the duck and it melts in the mouth. This is why the duck is the key ingredient here, it's fattier and it's the perfect choice. I will also post a variant with pork, but make sure that the meat is fattier or you also add oil to the cabbage.
