Chicken and duck liver pâté served with a slice of red wine marinated cheddar.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro & JE Nilsson 2020
A medley of different pâté recipes here, using grated ginger to Herbs de Provence.
Liver pâté is a food that is terribly unsexy to photograph. The eating of it however, is a different story. Rich and velvety on the tongue, chicken and duck liver pâté, made with a hint of your favourite port wine is a taste of sheer luxury.
A fond memory I have from growing up in Singapore is my mother hailing my brother and me into the kitchen where she had prepared a twin set of steaming bowls covered each with a saucer. She would lift the saucers, followed by the instruction, “Drink this, slowly, both of you. And eat everything in the bowl.” The bowls contained lightly poached pig´s liver. She would brew this for us every fortnight or so. I thought it was a most delicious thing to eat. That is until more than thirty years on, and I tasted this recipe of chicken and duck liver pâté in Sweden.
There are many recipes for liver pâté to be found on the Internet. In the accompanying video attached to this article, you´ll see that we have experimented with a few recipes, including one with ginger added, and one with Herbs de Provence. The challenge is to find a recipe that you personally love. In our case, we found our favourite when we followed a recipe from Werner´s, and it is highly unlikely that we will switch recipes for some time:
Ingredients
Chicken and duck liver pâté
300 g chicken liver
100 g duck liver
400 g butter
2 eggs
2 dl port wine or sherry
2 finely diced shallots
salt & pepper
Chicken skins
8 pieces of chicken skins from chicken fillets
Method
Sweat the shallots without it taking on color, pour in the port. Boil until the liquid has disappeared and then let it cool. Put liver, eggs and the port-cooked shallots in a food processor and blend. Pour in the hot melted butter (approx. 70 ° C) in an even stream during blending, so that it becomes a smooth batter. Season with salt and pepper. Pour the batter into a terrine mold lined with plastic wrap. Bake the batter in a 100 ° C hot oven for about 30 minutes to a core temperature of 65 ° C. Let the pie cool before using it.
As a serving suggestion, take 8 pieces of chicken skin from fillets, and begin with drying the chicken skins. Scrape the skin free of fat, place the skin on baking paper, in baking tins. Dry in the oven at 180 ° C for about 30-40 minutes. Remove the skin from the oven, lift gently, salt and allow to cool on kitchen paper. To serve, place a piece of chicken and duck liver pâté on the dried chicken skin, top with freeze-dried corn kernels.
Once this was baked and cooled, I basically sat down by the dining table, and had the pâté as I would a serving of ice-cream. After a spoonful or two, I commented that this was addictive stuff. To which the reply was, “It should be, it is half butter in that recipe.”
Warm and just out of the oven. The pâté can be savoured both warm from the oven (with the consistency of pudding), and cooled.
In this serving, we had the pâté served on a bed of leaves, with caramelized apples and cumberland sauce.
