Liver pâté
Onwards with the Christmas cooking business.
Pâté can be made up to five days ahead, and also freezes well. This recipe is loosely based on a River Cottage recipe (the place famous for the ten-bird-roast Christmas-special—don’t miss Channel Four tomorrow (21st), at 20:00! —BTW, I’ll stick to a single goose, thank you).
The bitterness of the pâté depends on the proportion of liver to other meat, and also on its coarseness. Since my food-processor is buggered, I had to use a pureé stick for mincing the liver, and it wasn’t sufficiently fine. From what stuck to the foil (hint: brush the foil with oil…), it tasted rather like the yucky stuff we used to make at boarding school in Denmark.
Whatever. It’s being matured right now, and I’ll find out what the final result is when we’re at my sister’s in Borth.
So, here goes:
Liver pâté
2 shallots; 2 bay leaves; small bunch fresh thyme; 575g liver (or less!); 3 pork sausages; 100g breadcrumbs; 100ml double cream; 1 egg, beaten; salt; pepper; 1tsp orange zest; 1 fingernail-size piece mace; 4-6 juniper berries; 1 pack streaky bacon
Use only free-range/organic meats. This is why home-made Liver pâté is a Christmas treat (I don’t know why pork liver is almost impossible to find outside farmers’ markets).
If you use less liver, substitute other meats to make up the amount. This recipe would use ca. 200g pork mince instead of the sausages, but you can reverse the proportions of meat to liver!
Preheat the oven to 160°C.
Finely chop the shallot and sweat in butter. Add the stripped thyme leaves and bay leaves for the final 3 minutes, fish out the bay leaves. If grating your own breadcrumbs, sift them. Grind and sift the mace, crush the pepper and juniper.
Chop the liver and process with the rest of the ingredients to desired degree of smoothness.
Place (rindless) bacon strips between 2 sheets of cling film—evenly spread out—and roll them flat with a rolling pin. Use them to line a loaf tin, overlapping evenly on both sides. If your bacon rashers are longer than mine—or you had more of them, placed end-to-end—this would mean that you could fold them over the filling so that the whole pâté would be encased in bacon, and not just three of its sides..
Now add the filling (very pink here, due to the camera setting) and fold over the bacon:
Prepare a bain-marie by pouring hot water into a container to come up to just underneath the lip of the loaf tin. Carefully place it in the oven. (I tend to pour the water into a pre-heated dish in the oven, then slide the tin inside. It is very easy to burn yourself this way—it’s prone to spitting!)
Bake 1½h.
Place a weight on top, a second loaf tin filled with rice/pulses or soup cans is ideal:
Leave to cool and chill for 3 days.
Tags: 'Round the World Recipes, Christmas, Food, Travel, Tag Index
Denni