SOUS VIDE CHICKEN LIVER PATE WITH ONION JAM – THE BEST LIVER PATE YOU WILL ever eat
Sous Vide Chicken Liver Pate with Onion Jam:
People always conceive of chicken liver pate as a restaurant dish. The fancy serving with the toasts and the jam made out of exotic fruits do create that impression.
But the truth is that chicken liver pate is not that complicated dish and can be easily made at home as long as you know what to do.
Making sous vide chicken liver pate is even easier to make.
In this recipe, I’m using a special cooking device called sous vide and a vacuum machine. If you don’t have them, don’t worry. At the end of the recipe, I will show you how to make the recipe without these devices.
WHAT IS SOUS VIDE COOKING?
The meaning of the French words sous vide is in a vacuum.
Sous vide machine is a heating device capable of heating water to a precise temperature up to 1 tenth of a degree.
In the sous vide cooking technique, we place the food we want to cook in a special bag and seal it under a vacuum. The bag is placed in a water bath heated with the sous vide machine and cooked at a regulated temperature.
Sous vide cooking is usually done at low temperatures and for a long period of time. This cooking technique allows the heat to spread evenly all over the food, unlike other cooking techniques where the food is exposed to high temperatures to heat the food’s inner part.
Imagine a thick steak on a grill. The steaks’ outer parts are exposed to 150 – 200C degrees for a long time to heat the steak’s inner part to 58C degrees (medium doneness). The outer parts are way overdone, while the inner part is at medium doneness.
In sous vide cooking, we cook the steak at a temperature of 58C degrees for 3 hours, and we get a steak done to medium doneness all over. The steak won’t dry or get overdone because it was never exposed to a temperature higher than 58C degrees.
Since the steak is done and ready to eat, we have to give ןt a short sear to give it the grilled aroma.
Chicken liver sous vide?
Cooking the chicken liver with the sous vide allows us to get perfectly even cooked livers. If we cooked the liver in a pan, the liver’s outer part would be well done, and the middle will be medium. This is the great advantage of the sous vide technique.
FOOD SAFETY AND SOUS VIDE
Food safety is a serious and complex matter.
To keep it simple without getting into complex explanations. The liver is cooked at 60C for 30 minutes. This is ample time to reach salmonella reduction.
According to the Modernist Cuisine (by Nathan Myrvold), it will take 11M and 34S to reach the salmonella reduction.
Chicken Liver Pate Made In Sous Vide With Onion Jam
Chicken Liver Pate Made In Sous Vide With Onion Jam
Ingredients
Making the chicken liver pate
- 450 grams chicken Liver
- 1.5 ts kosher salt
- 2 large spring thyme
Making stock and liver pate
- 3/4 cup unsalted butter Cut into cubes
- 1 tbsp unsalted butter
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 2 shallots Diced to small cube
- 3 cloves garlic Sliced to thin slices
- 1/4 cup sweet marsala wine
- 1/4 cup brandy
- 1 ts lemon juice
- 1/2 st kosher salt
- 1/2 ts ground black pepper
- 3 tbsp pistachio Roasted and roughly chopped
- 1 loaf sliced sourdough bread
products for making onion jam
- 8 red onions
- 30 grams unsalted butter
- 3/4 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup corn syrup
- 1/2 cup dry red wine
- 1/4 cup balsamic vinger
- 1/4 ts cumin seeds
Instructions
Making The Chicken Liver Pate:
-
Clean the liver and separate it into lobes.
-
Set the Sous Vide to 68C/154.4F and warm the water bath.
-
Salt the liver with the salt and place the liver in a vacuum bag. add the thyme springs and vacuum seal the bag.
-
Cook the liver for 30 minutes at 68/154.4FC.
-
While the liver is cooking combine the olive oil and 1 tbsp of butter in a pan. cook over medium heat until the butter starts to foam. Add the shallots, garlic, and salt and saute until shallots start to brown, around 5 minutes.
-
Add the Marsala wine and the brandy and simmer until the mixture starts to get syrupy and reduced to 1/3.
Let the mixture cool a bit and put it in the blender. do not blend yet.
-
When the liver is cooked. remove it from the vacuum bag. discard the thyme sprigs and liquids that accumulated in the bag.
-
Transfer the liver to the blender. add the pepper and the lemon juice. blend until the mixture is combined.
-
Add the butter and blend the mixture. stop and scrape down the sides with a spatula and blend again until the mixture is smooth.
-
Strain the mixture through a chinois strainer (fine-meshed strainer). taste and fix seasoning if needed.
-
Take an English cake baking tray. Cover its bottom with plastic wrap. leave an extra wrap on both sides.
Pour the liver pate mixture into the baking tray. Shake the tray gently to level the liver pate.
Cover the liver pate with the extra wrap or use more wrap if needed. Keep the wrap close to the liver pate surfece so the liver pate won't be exposed to air.
-
Chill the liver pate in the refrigerator overnight.
If you want to store the liver pate for more than one-night, melt 50 grams of butter and brush the surface of the liver pate with a nice layer of the melted butter. Chill the liver pate for an hour or until the butter solidifies and wrap it with plastic wrap. The butter will seal the pate from the air.
Making The Sourdough Toasts:
-
Heat oven to 180C/356F.
Cut a 5-centimeter disk out of each slice of the sourdough bread using a round cutter or a cup.
Place the disks on a baking rack and bake the disks for exactly 4 minutes.
Remover from the oven and let the toasts cool on a rack. using a rack is important to allow the steam coming out of the bread to evaporate and keep the toasts crispy.
Making The Onion Jam:
-
Peel and slice the red onions thinly.
-
Heat the butter in a pot.
Add the onions and cook them on a medium heat until they start browning keep stirring frequently.
-
Add the sugar and caramelize the onions well.
-
Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to low, and let it simmer untill the jam starts to thicken. it will take around 30 minutes to 45 minutes.
When dipping a metal spoon it the mixture it should be thick enough to lightly coat the back of your spoon.
let the jam cool completely.
Plating The Dish:
-
Take one spoon of the chicken liver pate and place it on a toast. put 1-teaspoon of onion jam and sprinkle some Roasted pistachio on top.
This is an excellent approach to chicken liver pate.
It solves two problems in one go. Modern chicken production is plagued by salmonella issues, but also chicken livers can get bitter by overcooking. The problem arises on how to cook them sufficiently that they are pasteurized, but not overcooked that they become bitter. Most recipes call for pan-frying of livers but usually state that they shouldn’t be ‘overcooked’. When one attempts to pan-fry a chicken liver, they are very difficult to cook all the way through as livers are quite ‘dry’, with no fat internally and can still be quite bloody inside even when the outside is brown because they don’t conduct heat well (hell, they should use chicken livers as a heat-shield on the next space shuttle!).
CLP is a 1970s/1980s dish and for the last 40 years, since I was a teenager, I have always been terrified that any ‘pinkness’ inside may carry salmonella, and there is the tendency to overcook in order to eliminate this risk, which might then ruin the taste.
I had a go a using my sous vide machine yesterday to try to crack this problem (following your recipe) and it worked perfectly! The pate ended up sweet, but pink – basically, perfect, and the best CLP I have ever made. I tested it on my fussy 20-year-old nephew and he was impressed. As he is fussy about food that doesn’t come out of a box, this was praise indeed.
Furthermore, because chicken livers generally come frozen (well, they do in my country) one can sous-vide them from frozen if a bit of extra time is added and this makes it easier if you are using a Foodsaver vacuum sealer like I do (no liquids to mess up the seal).
Thanks for an excellent recipe and one that is easier to implement than for example the Chef Steps’s one. However, for food safety reasons and following the basic sous-vide principles I would suggest chilling the cooked chicken livers completely in an ice bath immediately after cooking.
Thanks, Mikko for the kind words.
The livers need to be kept warm so they will melt the butter.
Just wow! So smooth and the best pate I’ve ever made. I took this to work and everyone said how amazing it was. I used 5 year old Madeira wine instead of the Marsala wine and one more garlic clove just because I love garlic! Also I used banana shallots. So so so happy and would highly recommend trying this.
Hi, I’m guessing your recipe calls for 450 ‘grams’ of liver, not 450 chicken liver as mentioned.
You are so right. Thanks for the comment. I’ve fixed it.
Hi, I’m guessing your recipe calls for 450 ‘grams’ of liver, not 450 chicken liver as mentioned.
You are so right. Thanks for the comment. I’ve fixed it.
Terrific recipe. I didn’t have marsala wine so I subbed some top-shelf sweet vermouth and it came out brilliantly. I also added four low-salt bacon rashers, minced. For what it’s worth, my recipe was doubled and it came out perfectly. The sous vide method on the livers results in a flawless cook.