Pâté for Christmas

We purchased some Mangalitsa pork fat and pork liver from Revival Meats a while back. The intent was to make a pâté or two. The liver was big, about 2.5 pounds. So we needed to find a couple of recipes, and someone to eat them with.

So, since we are having a big crowd for both Christmas and New Year's Eve, this was a good time to try out these recipes.


This is the pork back fat.


Doesn't it look great? I have another couple of pounds of this. I may make my own lard.


Doreen gave me this Le Creuset pâté dish last year, along with the book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Rulman and Polcyn. We have cooked a little from it before, but there are a ton of recipes here that I want to try. In particular, I want to make sausage.


The Julia Child recipe requires that you line the dish with fat.

Then you cook some rice:

which you use for binding.

Here is the fat, along with some liver. Isn't that liver great looking?

but it was not really that pleasant to the touch.


Here is Doreen, in her role as the grinder.


You have to weigh the pâté  to firm it up.

Looks nice, eh?


Next, we made one of the recipes from the book mentioned above. Here is the mixture, all ready to go:


You have to test the emulsion before you bake it. But you should not eat it raw. So you have to wrap it in plastic wrap and boil it. It gets hot:



For ease of de-molding, you need to line the dish with plastic wrap as well:

That is sort of odd, but it really helps.

Ready to cook!


This is the next day:


Here is the Julia Child pâté:


and the Ruhlman and Porcyn pâté:

It will be a delicious meal!

(More on the goose later)