Video: Anthony Bourdain on How to Cook a Mean Duck

Anthony Bourdain, author and TV personality, can be a polarizing figure, but you have to respect the guy. Though he is admittedly left of center, he understands better than most urban dwellers what it takes to meat on the table.

Recently, on his Travel Channel show, “No Reservations,” Bourdain visited rural Missouri on a trip to the Ozarks to meet with Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone. While there, he managed to put Woodrell in the hospital during an unfortunate sucker-gigging accident and also spent some time in a duck blind.

As you would expect from rural Missouri, a majority of the people Bourdain meets are hunters who know how to feed their families with a gun or bow. In fact, the show starts with Bourdain learning how to skin a squirrel and discussing the best way to grill a deer steak. Always quotable, Bourdain says: “When you want to find a good cook, you find a good hunter.”

While Bourdain and I both agree with that statement, he did have to school one particular duck hunter on the show, who in a surprisingly common refrain among waterfowlers, said: “If you found a good way to eat duck, you let me know. I have had duck about 100 different ways and it tastes equally as bad.”

Check out the clip above (it’s long, but worth it) and see Bourdain make it his mission to show these hunters a thing are two about how delicious a duck can be.