“Making the best of Yilan County’s geographical edge is the recipe for breeding the most flavorful cherry ducks,” said 51-year-old Huang Ming-chieh (黃明杰), a well-known duck farmer in the county’s Sansing Township (三星), whose poultry has become the source of top-notch gourmet delicacies.
The beautifully roasted ducks served by the Yilan-based Silks Place, the sole international five-star hotel in the county, was voted in September by gastronomes and netizens in an online poll “the most mouth-watering crispy ducks ever served in the country.”
The hotel’s accolade owed much to Huang and the cherry ducks he breeds — also known as Cherry Valley ducks — which can weigh up to 4.8kg in winter and produce the highest-quality meat.
Photo: Chiang Chih-hsiung, Taipei Times
After graduating from the department of animal husbandry and veterinary medicine at the Yilan School of Agriculture and Forestry — the predecessor of National Yilan University — Huang worked as a veterinarian for swine breeders before venturing into the duck farming industry by starting up the Ho Hsing Livestock Farm in his hometown about 16 years ago.
The sharp differences in temperature between day and night in Sansing Township, coupled with the wind frequently blowing from the mountains, are ideal appetite stimulants for Huang’s ducks, which require about 75 days to mature, leading to their thick chests and large bodies.
Huang’s ducklings that mature in winter can weigh 4.8kg, compared with ducks raised by other farmers, whose average weight stands at only 4.2kg.
Although Sansing Township’s advantageous environment and pollution-free water resources have played a crucial role in Huang’s success, the provision of around-the-clock care and a supply of high-quality animal feed and enzymes to improve digestion are equally important.
“Breeding ducks should be done as attentively as raising one’s own children,” Huang said, adding that he has to stay at his duck farm almost every night to guard and pay close attention to every move of his beloved poultry.
“You can never let your guard down even for one second,” Huang added.
In an effort to give his ducks more space, Huang breeds only about 35,000 ducks on his eight hectares of pasture, which could otherwise accommodate a maximum of 80,000 poultry.
He also went to the trouble of converting the farm into a “duck playground,” where the floor is paved with stone to avoid dust swirling in the air and a pond contains only shallow spring water to prevent duck excrement from accumulating and tainting the water.
Huang emerged as a successful duck farmer despite a sluggish domestic economy that has forced many duck farmers based in the county’s Lanyang Plain to go out of business.
Attributing his unexpected rise to his expertise in veterinary medicine and his diligence in studying the habits of cherry ducks, Huang said: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. To have an invincible foundation, one must work to build distinctive features for one’s products first.”
Born into a farming family, Huang said he took a leap of faith with his career and returned to the township after having worked away from his hometown for years.
“The moon just seems bigger here [in Sansing Township,]” he added.
Huang said in the initial stage of his business start-up, he bred only a handful of ducks to lower his financial risk and waited until his farming career got off the ground to expand its scale.
An environmentally conscious man, Huang has attached great importance to keeping his duck farm odor-free and sustainable.
“My ultimate goal is to see Sansing Township become the first word that crosses people’s minds whenever they talk about cherry ducks,” Huang said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,