Cooking with pate
A star rating of 4 out of 5. Serve this easy vegetarian pâté as a starter at a dinner party. Put the porcini mushrooms in a bowl and pour boiling water over them. Leave to soak cooking with pate 10 mins.
Melt the butter in a frying pan until foaming and fry the shallots over a low heat for 10 mins or until softened and translucent. Add the chestnut mushrooms and fry for 8 mins. Add the garlic and cook for 1 min. Set aside to cool for 20 mins. Tip the mushroom mixture into a food processor, along with the mascarpone, vinegar, parmesan and seasoning. Blitz until smooth while drizzling in the truffle oil.
For the topping, melt the butter in a small pan. When the milk solids separate and sink to the bottom, pour the clarified butter into a jug. Mix with the truffle oil and pour over each ramekin. Sprinkle with the thyme and peppercorns. Chill for at least 5 hrs.
Serve with cornichons and toast, if you like. RECIPE TIPSMAKE AS CANAPéSMake half the quantity of the pâté and set in a bowl. Spread 1 tsp of the pâté over mini crispbreads and top with slices of cornichon, if you like. This website is published by Immediate Media Company Limited under licence from BBC Studios Distribution.
1″:2,”2″:”Whether it’s chicken curry, the perfect roast or a one-pan wonder, our collection of chicken recipes has something for everyone. When you’re buying chicken, remember that organic and free-range chickens have lived longer and are stronger, healthier birds. Inexpensive, luxurious and dangerously easy, why does pâté seem to have gone out of fashion in this time of recession? It must have been declared naff while I was off making the melba toast, because it’s dropped off restaurant menus in all but the most firmly traditional of French bistros. Raymond Blanc recipe chicken liver pâté.
Raymond Blanc is the only chef to soak the livers before use: in the chicken liver parfait recipe in his book Foolproof French Cookery, he immerses them in a mixture of milk and salted water for six hours. Like Constance Spry, who is responsible for the second baked pâté recipe I try, he adds the livers to his pâté raw. Paul Merrony, chef of the tiny Giaconda Dining Room, has contributed a recipe for a smooth duck liver pâté to Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham’s retro cookery book, the Prawn Cocktail Years, which looks promising enough for me to adapt for chicken. All four seem to lack the savoury meatiness of the other recipes I try, which saute the livers in hot butter first. The initial browning process seems to be as important here as it would be in a stew or roast — it adds a depth of flavour. If they’re diced, I don’t think you need to fry them for five minutes as Delia suggests, though: they should still be slightly pink in the middle. Spry combines the liver with chopped bacon, which, although it’s a tried and tested flavour combination, doesn’t work in a pâté: the bacon just takes over.
Perhaps it would be better with a more strongly flavoured liver: she doesn’t specify any particular variety in her recipe. Paul Merrony recipe chicken liver pâté. Although I’m tempted to try Alain Chapel’s warm chicken liver parfait recipe as given in Michel Roux Jr’s A Life in the Kitchen, I decide reluctantly that a dish served warm and turned out onto a plate garnished with a crayfish claw isn’t strictly in the spirit of what I’m trying to create. It’s a shame, because I’m intrigued by the idea of a pâté made with bone marrow — I’d be interested to know if anyone has tried it. Saveur, in a nod to the laws of kosher, suggests chicken fat as an alternative to butter and minces in hard-boiled eggs as a thickener. Constance Spry recipe chicken liver pâté.
