Pâté

I've just made the CS chicken liver pate and it's come out very nicely! Sealed the jars a little too tight, as I was worried about water getting in, so some of them have cracked a little, but it's fine.

I'm trying to understand exactly how the recipe 'works,' from a whats-going-on-in-the-jar point of view, so that I can adapt it to other things.

My understanding so far is:

* We make a liquid from the blended livers + the infused alcohol reduction. This is mostly water, with proteins from the liver suspended in it.

* Blending in the clarified butter turns it all into an emulsion.

* The eggs are used to stabilise.

* When we cook the pate, the main things we're looking to do is a) transform the liver proteins in some way, b) kill Campylobacter if present, and c) set the eggs.

* Cooling the pate in the ice bath afterwards is partly about stopping the cooking but mostly about making the butter fat solidify.

* The end result is kinda like a block of butter with liver/flavourings distributed throughout, with the egg helping to hold it all together.

Is that about right? If so I'm wondering how far I can go substituting the liver for other things - e.g. making a mushroom pate that is butter-based instead of the usual cream cheese approach.

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brian_martin2001

If you have any that are cracked: I recommend discarding them. You don't know for sure if there are any very fine slivers of glass that could be present in the pate.

The ice bath will allow it to see up more rapidly, but it's an unnecessary step. You can put them in the refrigerator and get the exact same results: it just takes longer.

The liver itself offers quite a bit of structure itself. If you're going to be replacing it with mushrooms, you'll need to experiment a bit with the ratios.

As for your "flavored butter" concept, no. There is not enough water removal in the process and there are far more other ingredients to make this, what you're referring to in a round about way, as a compound butter.

richard.fine

Thanks! I'll check how bad the cracking on the jars really is - I think in one case the crack was luckily in the very bottom, so the rest of the jar ought to be fine, but there's at least one with a big crack up the side that I'll need to be more careful with. For mushrooms I was considering borrowing from the 'High-tech mushroom burger' recipe and using some transglutinimase to add more structure, will see how it works. And sure, this isn't compound butter - I hadn't considered it but you're absolutely right, all that liquid that was in the emulsion hasn't got anywhere to go, so it must still be in there, I guess held in place by the egg proteins and fat droplets from the butter? Explains why pate can 'weep' too, guess it's not syneresis but more like the butter softening a bit and allowing some liquid to escape?

brian_martin2001

I have yet to experience this pate weeping, even when chilled and warmed a few times. If the water were separating out of the emulsion, it wouldn't be on top. Sure, the proteins and lecithin from the egg aid a bit, but it's also the protein matrices from the liver itself. Ignore the butter altogether. The amount of butter used didn't have the ability to hold that much water in suspension.

richard.fine

It's not happened to me either, though I did see it's happened to at least one other person (https://www.chefsteps.com/forum/posts/liver-pate). OK, so definitely sounds like if I want to swap the liver out, I'll need to replace it with something that can bind as much when cooked, and/or supplement with something like transglutinimase. Thanks!