[Chicken Liver Mousse Recipe Thomas Keller
Betty Neyhart
Heat 2 tablespoons butter in a large skillet until melted and bubbly. Add the chicken livers and cook over medium-high heat until browned, 2 to 3 minutes, then turn and add the onion. Continue cooking, stirring, until the chicken livers are almost cooked through, 3 to 4 minutes.
2 Tablespoons Armagnac or Cognac1. Melt 2 Tablespoons of the butter in a saut pan over medium heat. Add shallots and cook until softened but not browned, about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, if using truffle, finely chop all but 4 shavings (reserve these for garnish) and set aside.2. Add chicken livers and cook, covered, over medium heat until just cooked through, 57 minutes.3. Remove pan from heat and stir in salt, mustard, nutmeg, and cloves. Transfer to a food processor and pure until smooth. Continue to process, blending in remaining 4 Tablespoons butter, cream cheese, and Armagnac. Mix in chopped truffle (if using), then transfer to small bowls or well-oiled molds, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm, about 24 hours.4. Serve a generous portion of pt on a bed of greens with bread, olives, and caper berries, if desired, and garnish with reserved truffle shavings.
This French-inspired neighborhood bistro overlooking McCarren Park will be serving its signature market-driven menu featuring classic, yet approachable, French dishes, with holiday flare. A three-course dinner will include choices like winter squash soup with acorn and butternut squash, chicken liver mousse with brioche, heritage turkey with cranberry sauce and gravy, trout almondine with haricot vert, porchetta with wild rice and celeriac salad and more. Cornbread and stuffing will be served to share at the table, as well as desserts including pumpkin pie tart with cognac caramel and pear tarte tatin with candied walnuts and vanilla ice cream. $68 per person, 1 p.m. to 10pm, reservations via OpenTable
As the chicken roasts, chicken juices drip down, and the bread becomes first soaked, then toasted and caramelized. In other words, it becomes Chicken Bread. And Chicken Bread is incredible stuff: Crunchy, salty, full of savory chicken flavor. You can cube it and toss it in salad for the ultimate panzanella, use it for a BLT, spread it with, oh, I don't know, chicken liver mousse. Or you can just serve it with that roasted chicken. But note: Chicken Bread is always the main; the actual chicken is served on the side.
Ok maybe this is silly to mention, but I've seen it happen enough times that I think it needs to be said: you need to check the cavity of the chicken before you roast it. When you buy a whole chicken, the neck, liver, gizzard, and heart (aka the giblets) are usually tucked inside the cavity of the bird, often in a paper or plastic pouch. Those should be removed, but don't discard them! The giblets (except for the liver) are great for making stock, and if you save up enough livers, you can make some decadent mousse.
If you want to know how to cook a whole chicken in a slow cooker, we've got a great recipe for that too. This one features paprika and garlic powder, but you can season it however you wish with the same technique.
Secondly, this is not my original recipe. I'm not even sure who it's from, it was served at The Meeting Place eight or nine years ago, and I've adopted it to be the best version of itself. Chicken liver mousse is a very classic dish with a lot of history, so it's fun to add my own touch to it.
Thoroughly rinse and dry chicken livers. This part is critical. If there is excess moisture on them, they will not sear, and the difference between a finished recipe with nicely browned livers and pale, gray, steamed ones is immense. Add the livers to the pan, and cook until they're browned on the outside, about 2 minutes on each side. When they're done, they should still be a little pink on the inside, which is perfectly safe. Remove the livers from the pan, and set aside.
Let everything cool to room temperature, then put the chicken livers, the onion-garlic mixture, the butter and the cream into the food processor, and blend until smooth. Season with salt and pepper, to taste, and strain through a fine-mesh strainer. Scoop all of the mousse into your container of choice, and pour the rendered bacon fat on top. This will help to keep the texture and prevent the mousse from oxidizing.
On any given day there might be torchons of butter soft foie gras scented with cognac and orange served with preserves, whole de-boned chickens put back together in the almost Frankenstein galantine: a perfect cylinder of pounded breast wrapping an emulsified mousse of dark meat flecked with duxelles, all wrapped in the birds skin.
A classic lyonnaise dish, chicken and crayfish, was this year's theme. Team USA's platter was made up of poulet de Bresse served with sauce Amricaine, chicken liver mousse and Maine lobster tail with Meyer lemon mousse, then garnished with slow-poached sweet carrots, sugar snap pea crisps and Rose Finn potatoes.My mom and I had a conversation on the phone the other day about a particular meal from my childhood that I really, really hated: liver. Not even liver and onions, but liver with other sides I don't remember because I was way too focused on how disgusting and stinky liver was. Oh, I ate other things as a kid that many people would find sort of disgusting -- hogmaw (pig's stomach stuffed with sausage and potatoes) comes to mind -- but I couldn't stand liver of any sort. Chicken livers -- blech. Calf's liver -- vomitorious. Mom said she doesn't remember my hating liver that much, but I know she's blocked it from her memory because I was such a freakin' brat about some things (okay, many things) that she had to purge at least some of these awful childhood culinary peccadilloes of mine from her brain. I know I would have.
I have a very clear memory of a late spring/early summer evening when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was sitting in our family room watching TV, and as the smells began to waft from the kitchen down to where I was, I wondered to myself, "Wow. Who died in our kitchen and how long has the body been rotting there?" Or had the sewer line backed up? Or maybe my brother was suffering from one of his famous Dorito-induced farting spells? As I walked up the stairs from the family room to the ktichen to sit down at the table for dinner, I realized the smell was actually food-related when I saw what was sitting on our plates at the table. Liver. As we talked about our day, I ate whatever the side dishes were, and tried one bite of liver even though I hated it. I wanted to at least get credit for trying it. But I couldn't get past one bite.
I only half participated in the dinnertime conversation because I was too busy disdainfully eyeballing the nasty piece of liver sitting in front of me. My parents asked me to finish my dinner before I was excused (back then, I believe it was the Cambodian children who were starving). I remember the smell and the texture and the thinness of the cut and the eeeewwwwwwwwww, and came up with the brilliant idea of covering it with so much salt and pepper that OF COURSE my parents wouldn't make me finish it. But, as always, they outsmarted me and told me I had to sit at the table until I'd finished my liver. No TV, no reading, no nothing. So, while my brother got to be excused, I just sat at the table until 9 o'clock that night, head in hands, shifting my body weight as the chair grew more and more uncomfortable, and sighing heavily and dramatically every 15 minutes or so. But I was not going to take one more bite, no sir.
Not long after 9 p.m., my mom quietly took the plate away and just gave me a look -- a look that I knew meant I was supposed to keep my mouth shut, go upstairs, and go to bed. I knew I had been a jerk, and probably could've been excused had I tried one more teensy bite instead of killing that poor, disgusting liver even further with fourteen pounds of salt and pepper, but I was trying to make a statement. I was trying to be an activist. I was trying to.... okay, I was being a brat.
So, even though I am really enjoying all the meat preparations in The French Laundry Cookbook, I was not really psyched about making liver. And really, I hope my mom isn't offended by the story above, because my distaste of liver is not her fault and has nothing to do with th
Inside Dedalus, a wine market and restaurant in Burlington, Vermont, I sat puzzled. Bread and butter were on the menu for $12, priced the same as a tempting chicken liver mousse. Unconvinced that the age-old duo should carry such a cost, I went with the cow itself: beef tartare dotted with caviar and shavings of horseradish. Still, the waiter returned to push the bread and butter. And in the end, curiosity won out; I caved.
When the very fancy butter arrived, it was perched on a rustic wood board, deep yellow and sitting opposite a loaf of olive ciabatta. The kitchen had dressed it up with coarse sea salt and a dusting of ground black pepper. This was not restaurant butter as I remembered it: a sad, foil wrapped rectangle melting into a pool next to a dinner roll.
Besides bold asks of Michelin star chefs, St. Claire jumped through a significant number of hoops to make her butter extra special. She gave the cows space to rest and roam and fed them what they were biologically designed to eat: grass. (Their diet was supplemented with hay year-round, and grain in the winter.) She crossbred her American Jerseys with Jerseys from Holland (which produce more butterfat) and Jerseys from New Zealand (which are more efficient grazers). Still, she kept her herd small so she could carefully assess their health, habits, and needs. All this translated to better, albeit more expensive, milk.
Spoon the livers and onion into the bowl of a food processor, along with the salt, black pepper and Cognac, and puree until smooth. Cut up the remaining stick of butter and add bit by bit to the liver, continuing to puree until smooth and blended. Spoon the liver mixture into a bowl. Cover and refrigerate until it firms up enough to pipe through a tube.
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