Monday, February 14, 2011

Chicken Pate

Chicken Pate & Onion Marmalade(1)
Again, I had never thought this was some thing to even consider making at home, but hey, its really easy. It was good the first time I made it, and I was so almost shocked it was so easy. Chicken pate is basically pureed chicken liver, cooked, with about half as much of butter or/and cream cheese mixed in. Shallots/Onions and garlic are really good also in the mix, as are cloves, cardamons, and my secret ingredient mace, which is covering of the nutmeg seed.
I'd rather, as you dear readers may have noticed, go recipe free at times-- opting for a intuitive, weighted description of the basics of the method. I think that helps a cook innovate on their own, so here goes:
Start by heating some butter, a large pat or 15g (one table sp), with large diced shallot and 4 cloves of chopped garlic. Add 2-3 cloves, cardamon pods, two pinches of shredded mace, 10 black pepper corns and two pinches of salt. When the shallots are translucent, add 250g of chicken liver. No, it doesn't have to be chopped. Just stir it around, for ten mins or so, and you are done. Puree this, with a hand held blender if you have one, and add more butter and/or cream cheese about half of the liver weight, total -- in this example, that would be 125g of butter. In the batch in the pic, I used about 70g of butter, and may be 75g of cream cheese. You can do it with out cream cheese, it just comes out thicker!
I added a teaspoon of gelatin, and poured it into a butter cake tray, and refrigerated it overnight. This helps set it, so that you can turn it out for a nice photo, but I've refrigerated this with out gelatin also -- and got a very spreadable pate.
Spread on a cracker, this has a rich, meaty taste -- and spices really gives its a very warm, rich flavor -- and goes very well, with the tart, chewy, fragrant, onion marmalade, with its lingering sweet kithul after taste.
I kid you not, you can keep eating this, until you've had too much!
Chicken Pate & Onion Marmalade(2)

2 comments:

Angel said...

Oh, yummy... I really should try this.... sadly, I'm the only one in my family that likes chicken liver!

Pradeep Jeganathan said...

ok, but i really dislike the taste of liver too!? But for some reason, and I have not yet understood, pate -- chicken, or beef, does not taste like liver at all, in that way.

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