Cooking Eorzea Week 45: Starlight Dodo (FINAL FANTASY XIV Online)

I have been ridiculously excited about making Starlight Dodo for a very long time as part of Cooking Eorzea. I love both the Starlight Celebration and Christmas, and it is something that I look forward to every year. While it is not my absolute favorite holiday (that is New Year’s Eve!), it is my second favorite. Both Eorzea and real life (admittedly, rarely) become covered in snow, the music changes to holiday cheer, and people show affection for each other by giving gifts. I myself run a Secret Santa for my college friends, and I have every year since 2010. After all the names are drawn and gifts are shipped around the world, we all get together online, hang out, catch up, and open gifts. It is one of the core ways that we all keep in touch with each other, even as each of us get married and have children and develop careers.

And as for me? I secretly (at least, until this goes live) listen to Christmas music year-round on my phone. It’s that little random pop of happiness and joy that I get to experience whenever I want, even in the hundred-degree-plus California summers. It always lifts my mood up, and it puts me in a happy spirit with plenty of Love, Eorzean Style, even when I wasn’t expecting to be.

I think there is something really unique about Starlight Celebration in Eorzea and Christmas in real life, and this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish really kept me in the holiday mood all week long while preparing to make it and as I am writing this column. Plus, stay tuned at the very end to learn a bit about how KFC became a Japanese Christmas tradition as I explain why I chose the decoration I did to accompany this week’s dish!

If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.

Recipe of the Week

Starlight Dodo is the 46th recipe in the cookbook, and it has a difficulty rating of ‘Medium.’ While this dish comes out of the Black Shroud region, I think this dish belongs to Eorzea as a whole due to its connection to the Starlight Celebration. Personally, I was afraid of catching the duck dish on fire more than anything else after my prior experience with making the Meat Miq’abobs when making this dish. Thankfully, I wouldn’t be working with open flames over a grill, and the recipe including using a baking sheet to catch the duck grease before it can drip into the oven.

Here is what Starlight Dodo looks like in the hands of a Starlight Celebration-seasoned professional chef!

Featured Ingredient of the Week

While I had previously featured duck breast as my Featured Ingredient of the Week for Meat Miqa’bob way back in Week 12, this time I was working with the whole duck for the recipe and preparing it the dish. Duck meat is a high-fat, high-protein lean meat that can be prepared in a variety of ways. I ended up having to visit several supermarkets to find one that sold whole duck, as the shop that I went to back in March 2022 didn’t have it for sale anymore. I won’t lie – the bird kind of freaked me out at first to work with, and I dreaded cutting off the head and neck of it.

With the whole duck being such a central ingredient to making Starlight Dodo, I knew it had to be my Featured Ingredient of the Week for Cooking Eorzea!

My Cooking Attempt

Starlight Dodo wouldn’t be Starlight Dodo without a variety of ingredients being used. For this week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, these are what I used:

This was a two-day recipe, due to me needing to let the duck rest for a day before cooking. On the first day, I removed the head and neck of the duck with my cleaver.

I then trimmed off the excess fat around the neck and cavity. Duck meat, as I mentioned earlier, is very fatty already and so it doesn’t need the excessive fat unconnected to meat in order to be flavorful.

Setting the duck aside for the moment, I brought several cups of water up to a boil in a pot.

I then scooped out the boiling water and poured half of it over the duck breast while it was suspended over my sink, and then flipped the bird over and poured the rest over on the other side. The boiling water is to help tighten the skin around the duck.

I then heavily salted the entire duck and tied the back feet together with butcher’s twine.

I then placed the duck in the refrigerator for around 22 hours on a wire sheet and baking tray setup.

Just before I was ready to pull the duck out, I crushed several garlic cloves, and I sliced the shallot into halves.

I then halved both the lemon and the orange.

I pulled the duck out of the refrigerator, and I patted it dry all over with paper towels. Once that was done, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

I coated the duck with pepper next.

I then jammed half an orange into the duck cavity, followed by the garlic. I made sure to push the orange half as far into the duck as I could, and I tried my best to spread the garlic around inside afterwards.

I then inserted some of the lemon and the rosemary sprig inside.

As I tried to insert the shallot halves, I realized that I was quickly running out of room inside the duck cavity.

I ended up having to halve the orange and lemon halves into quarter slices, and then work furiously to cram all of those and the remaining shallots into the duck. It was more than a little miraculous that I did not destroy the duck in the process!

With that accomplished, I put the duck into the oven for an hour.

I then pulled it out, flipped the duck over, and put the duck back into the over for another 25 minutes. You can tell from these pictures already how the skin was starting to really crisp up.

While the duck was roasting for a second time, I started to make the glaze. I added together molasses, honey, and orange juice in a bowl before blending it all together. This took a lot longer than I expected it to, but it finally became a solid glaze in the end.

When I removed the duck for the second time, I coated the underside with the glaze and put it back in for another 25 minutes to roast.

When the timer went off, I pulled the duck back out, flipped it over, painted the breast-side with glaze, and then put it back into the oven again for 20 more minutes.

I finally pulled the duck out one last time, coated it all over with glaze one last time, and then put it back into the oven for another 10 minutes to try to cook the meat thoroughly through.

I pulled the duck out, and checked the temperature with a meat thermometer in the duck breast to make sure the entire dish was at the proper temperature. It registered 180 degrees Fahrenheit, which was more than enough.

I then wrapped the entire duck up in aluminum foil for 15 minutes to let the meat rest and finish cooking.

Once it was done, I pulled the aluminum foil off to serve it.

And here is what Starlight Dodo looks like when it is finished!

While this final dish photo seems to be an incredibly weird juxtaposed product placement at first, it is worth talking a bit about before I discuss how the dish tasted. In the 1970s, Kentucky Fried Chicken came to Japan and started a marketing campaign in 1974 that KFC’s fried chicken, paired with a bottle of wine, should be used for Christmas parties. Titled “Kentucky for Christmas”, it was a massive marketing success and eating KFC became a Japanese Christmas tradition that still exists today.

In FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, the yearly Starlight Celebration event is more or less a stand-in for Christmas. In game lore, the event dates back to Ishgard during the Dragonsong War when children were orphaned in Coerthas. Ishgardian knights would give those orphans a place to stay inside their barracks, even though it was forbidden, during the winter. The children would be dressed in scarlet uniforms to be snuck in and hidden. After the harsh winter was over, the children would pay that kindness shown to them forward by wearing scarlet uniforms and giving gifts to other children during the coldest week of the year. They gradually became known as Saint’s Little Helpers, and the captain of the knights that helped those orphans so long ago became known as ‘Saint of Nymeia’. The Starlight dodo, according to FFXIV lore, is a dish prepared at the end of the year as an offering to the Twelve.

Finally, back in September 2023, FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and Kentucky Fried Chicken announced a crossover promotion for Japanese KFC restaurants that included stickers, a specialty box, and a Japanese region-only emote for eating chicken.

So, this week’s dish photo is a blending of Japanese Christmas traditions with Eorzean Starlight Celebration lore, topped off with a crossover real-life event between FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and KFC to link it all together in a harmonious and layered holiday-oriented way.

As for the Starlight Dodo itself? Absolutely fantastic. It turned out that the orange and lemon really infused itself with the meat, and I could taste both fruits in each duck breast bite. The skin had an orange flavor to it too, and I loved how crispy it was and how well it went with the duck meat. I could faintly taste the rosemary at times too, though I couldn’t pick up any of the shallot in the overall flavor. The duck breast itself was extremely succulent, and it just fell apart beneath my fork and knife. This was an excellent dish, and one that definitely is fit for a Starlight Celebration.

Afterword

If I was to make this dish again, I would probably halve the orange and lemon into quarters, and try to slide them in sequentially, instead of starting off with a whole orange half and cramming everything else in around it. The recipe called to only halve the orange and lemon, but I just had such a hard time making that work with everything else that I needed to fit into the duck cavity. Otherwise, it was absolutely perfect.

In keeping with this belated Starlight Celebration holiday, I should give out some thank yous! First off, I need to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook and giving me this wonderful Starlight Dodo dish to make for Cooking Eorzea. I also need to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. I think it is important to show that my attempts can sometimes look quite like what the professionals create, even if I am not a professional myself. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for Cooking Eorzea on short notice, and you should check his works out over on X.

Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. The Starlight Celebration and Cooking Eorzea simply wouldn’t exist without both of them putting in the time to make it happen.

In Two Weeks

Unfortunately, there will be no Cooking Eorzea next week, as I will be covering an event down in Los Angeles for oprainfall.

However! When Cooking Eorzea returns, I will be making Stuffed Cabbage Roll from the Gyr Abania region. It is a combination of cabbage, ground lamb, rice, and several other ingredients, so please look forward to that!

Let us know in the comments below!