Garlic: Chicken liver pâté

[ewt]

This is sortof cross-posted (I've cleaned it up a bit from the version on my DW), and sortof late: I made it on Sunday night, before the challenge was set. But this week I'm staying in a hotel and my cooking facilities consist of a kettle; I did, however, bring a tub of this stuff with me, and ate it for supper dinner my evening meal on Thursday night, and it was very good.

Equipment:
frying pan and spatula
handheld stick blender thingy (technically you can use a fork instead but it's much harder work)
microwave (optional, it's just for melting butter)
mixing bowl
some kind of container to put the finished pâté into, I prefer several small ones to one big one.

Ingredients:
2 tsps chopped garlic (I used frozen)
a pinch of cinnamon (optional; you could also use black pepper or nutmeg or similar)
400g chicken livers, fresh or defrosted
150-200g butter (that's, er, 2/3 of a cup to 5/6 of a cup, sortof: two cups of butter is 454g, but butter here comes in 250g blocks. It's not important for this to be exact, but it's better to have too much than not enough; you may want a little more of it if you aren't using brandy, or if you're using very shallow containers. I used salted. Ghee probably works too but I haven't tried it.)
some brandy (optional, but really tasty -- sorry, I didn't measure this, but it was maybe a shot glass worth or two)

Note: I used organic chicken livers, which were £2.69 for the 400g fresh. If you want to economise, they are much, much cheaper in their non-organic version, and cheaper still when frozen. But even using posh organic chicken livers this works out at around 70 or 80p/100g, which is much cheaper than any comparable pre-made product, and probably has more chicken liver in it too.

Method, or as close to one as you'll get from me:

Put some butter -- about a third of a 250g block -- in a pan on high heat, add chopped garlic, add chicken livers and a pinch of cinnamon. Cook, stirring lots, until they are well browned on both sides. Turn off heat. Add some brandy. Tip the lot into a mixing bowl. Use a hand-held blender thingy on them until you have a paste. If you like, add more brandy.

If you don't work quickly, it goes solid as it cools, and then you have to add more brandy to get the consistency right. Whether this is a feature or a bug depends on your circumstances.

Put the pâté into small containers. I used three 200ml plastic containers but they're really too big (and are not completely full). Bang them on the countertop to remove air bubbles.

Put another third of a 250g block of butter into a microwaveable container with a spout, and nuke it until just melted. Dip a spatula (or clean finger -- but careful, it's hot!) into the butter and use it to smooth down the tops of the little pots of pâté and wipe any splatters from the sides. Pour melted butter over the pâté. Put lids on containers. Allow to cool, then refrigerate.

If you want it to last longer, you can do some more melted butter after the initial layer goes solid, since the butter tends to pull away from the edges of the container as it solidifies.

This makes, I think, six fairly hefty portions of fairly rich chicken liver pâté -- about 550g I guess? I didn't weigh the end product, and while some water will have evaporated, I did add some brandy. It certainly keeps up to about a week in the refrigerator, but once you get through the butter layer on the top of each container you want to finish it in a day or two. Our household basically loves the stuff, so I really don't know what happens if you leave it in the refrigerator more than a week.

Serve with toast or crackers. Chutney or jelly can be nice. Salad is good. I ate it with a package of pre-cut "crunchy crudités".

Variations: if you want less alcohol or just don't have any brandy in the house, you can use port or sherry or wine instead of brandy. If you're completely teetotal, grape juice will work, but not too much. If you happen across a duck liver, chucking that in works, and it's glorious with Cointreau. It's probably possble to use double cream instead of brandy, but I haven't tried it and it might lead to something better described as chicken liver parfait rather than pâté.

Comments

[miss_s_b]

I second Cointreau, that's what my family uses in pate