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I’ve recently reconnected with an old favorite – Alice Water’s Simple Homemade Sausage – and I remembered how much I love these flavors together. Why not make an inspired pâté? To balance the stronger flavor of chicken liver, I increased all the spices. And added a heap of extra lard. This matches the fat profile of other pâté recipes I like, and I see no shame in aiming for 10x when it comes to fat-soluble vitamins.
In the end, I like having a super spreadable and smooth mousse. Easy for veggies and no complaints from the kids about little bits of connective tissue. I decided to take the extra (albeit not necessary) step of pressing our pâté through a medium-mesh sieve with the back of a ladle to make liver mousse. See how easy in this video.
From there, I scooped out the mousse into pint and cup jars – one for later in the week, and the rest into the chest freezer. In the end, these spices came together exactly as I hoped.
Pâté with Sausage Seasonings is a quick recipe to get some liver down the hatch before the nearest competitor. Perfect for both seasoned liver lovers and those still in the making. Enjoy!
Read more about this recipe.
Ingredients
- 1 lb chicken livers, cleaned of excess connective tissue and roughly chopped
- 1/2 cup lard, divided
- salt (1 heaping tsp of fine sea salt or adjusted)
- 1/2 t ground pepper
- 1 T fresh sage, chopped
- 1/4 t (freshly grated) nutmeg
- 1/4 t cayenne
Instructions
- Clean up your chicken livers, cutting off any connective strips or dark spots, and roughly chop. You can be much quicker than usual if you plan to pass the puree through a sieve as described in step 4 below.
- Saute the chicken livers. Add 2 tablespoons lard to the pan (for each batch, if the livers don’t all fit in one pan). Heat on medium until lard is melted, then saute the livers for about 2-3 minutes per side until they are a little browned, but still pink in the middle. Pour all of this off into a food processor or blender jar.
- Return pan to the stove on low and add remaining lard. Meanwhile, as the lard melts, add salt, pepper, sage, nutmeg and cayenne and blend until smooth. When the remaining lard is melted, add it to the food processor/blender as well.
- (Optional) Pour the mixture through a medium-mesh sieve over a bowl. Use the back of a ladle, moving in circles around the sieve, to push the puree through. All the tangly bits and excess connective tissue will be caught up in the sieve. In the bowl you will be left with a easy-to-eat smooth-as-can-be mousse.
- Taste for seasonings and then pour or spoon pate/mousse into jars. Cover each jar with a little piece of parchment or wax paper to keep it from oxidizing. Generously lick your spatula and other utensils before washing.
Sounds good, but the headline should read “mousse” and not “mousee”.