I can’t remember now what steered me toward it, but I recently acquired a copy of Charcuterie Specialties, by Jean-Claude Frentz and Michel Poulain, and this recipe comes from their book. I had to try it, because it sounded crazy. This recipe completely turns what I thought I knew about making a pâté on its head.

Pâtés can be “country-style” or coarse-textured, but this one is a smooth-textured, emulsion-type. As Elton David Aberle et al. explain in The Principles of Meat Science, “An emulsion is defined as a mixture of two immiscible liquids, one of which is dispersed in the form of small droplets or globules in the other liquid. [Think of the oil and vinegar in salad dressing.] . . . In sausage emulsions, soluble proteins dissolved in the aqueous phase act as emulsifying agents coating all surfaces of the dispersed fat particles” (128-130). The point of a meat emulsion is to break the fat up into minute particles, because they separate the meat fibers from each other and lubricate the tissue, with the result that the texture seems delicate, light, and creamy. [Think of the tenderness of a well-marbled steak.] Finely-dispersed fat particles also do a better job of slowing down the progress of flavor-bearing molecules over our tongue and thus of “bringing out” the flavor of the meat and other ingredients. In fact, studies have shown that if you remove every speck of fat from meat, tasters can no longer tell if they are eating chicken or pork or beef or lamb.

Now everything I had previously read told me that the secret to a stable emulsion and a good pâté is to keep the meat–and everything that comes in contact with the meat!–as cold as freakin’ possible. In the chapter on pâtés in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book, they write,

In order to combine the meat and fat perfectly, they must be very cold. If they become warm, the fat can soften or melt, and ultimately you can wind up with a broken forcemeat, just as you can wind up with a broken hollandaise. Until your pâté goes in the oven, you must do all that you can to keep the meat cold. Don’t let your ingredients and tools get warm. You don’t have to be fanatical about it–moving your KitcheAid out on the back deck in February snow–but do be slightly paranoid about it. Chill your grinder attachment in the freezer for an hour or more before grinding. When not working with any of the ingredients, keep them refrigerated. Set the bowl that will catch the ground meat in a larger bowl of ice. . . . If, you need to stop after grinding for whatever reason, return the meat to the refrigerator or freezer until you’re ready to proceed.” (206)

And they are not alone in this fanaticism or paranoia. In Modern Garde Manger, Robert Garlough and Angus Campbell write, “both the meat and grinding heads must be well chilled to prevent fat separation” (532). The CIA’s Garde Manger book also says, “Temperature control is the key to achieving the best results” (301). And finally, in Fritz Sonnenshmidt’s Charcuterie he insists, “Keep ingredients cold. Keep equipment cold. This is important to the success of pâtés and terrines” (209).

In Frentz and Poulain’s recipe for this liver terrine, all this fanaticism for freezing temperatures, all this paranoia about cold-processing, is tossed out the window.

In their recipe, all the soft pork fat (from the ham or belly), which makes up 2/3 of the meat, is cut into 1-inch chunks, poached in hot water for 5-10 minutes, then puréed with the liver while still “hot through to the center.” (They do warn in their notes that you don’t want to cook the fat enough to liquefy it.) As is this weren’t enough, they also have you infuse milk with vegetables and herbs, and then pour this into the processor at a temperature of 60ºC (or about 150ºF). The result was a fine emulsion and the best pâté I’ve made yet–with absolutely no separation of the fat during cooking.

How is this possible?

Part of the secret, I think, is the eggs–all 9 of them (for 1 kg of pork liver and 2 kgs of belly and jowl or enough meat to make 4 pâtés). Just as you can make hollandaise sauce in a blender by drizzling very hot melted butter into a mixture of egg yolks and lemon juice or bind a sauce by whisking in an egg yolk while it’s hot, so adding the hot fat chunks and hot milk to the blended liver and egg mixture in the food processor seems to heat the eggs enough to thicken the mixture. As long as the temperature of the meat batter as a whole does not exceed 21º C (70º F), the melting point for pork fat, the emulsion should not break. I didn’t think to check the temperature of my batter after the 2 or 3 minutes of processing that this took, but I plan to next time; it certainly didn’t feel any warmer than room temperature.

In Cookwise, Shirley Corriher calls such a liason “a quick, casual emulsion,” but she points out that they can be dangereux, as they “are barely stable” (296). In his book dedicated to Sauces, James Peterson calls hot egg-yolk emulsions “tenuous.” All I can say is I had no trouble with this recipe, and the leftover meat batter that went into the fridge and didn’t get cooked until the following day behaved just as nicely. I’m sure the gentle heating of cooking it in a hot water bath in a low oven helps a great deal not to destabilize the emulsion. Frentz and Poulain call for cooking the pâté until the center reaches 78º C (175º F), but this seemed to be courting danger to me, since eggs scramble and lose their ability to bind sauces at 80º C (180º F). One pâté heated up to 165º F in the center while I pulled the other out of the bath at 150º F. I couldn’t tell any difference in taste or texture between the two, so I would err on the side of the lower temperature, just enough to cook the meat.

So is this some trick of classical French charcuterie that has been ignored or largely lost? Are a couple eggs added to the mix all that’s needed to be able to dispense with the chilling and freezing and make a perfect pâté out of hot ingredients instead? Apparently, the ratio of fat is also an issue. In the CIA’s Garde Manger book they claim that “when forcemeats are kept well chilled throughout processing, mixing, and cooking they require less fat” (301), and indeed Frentz and Poulain’s recipe does reverse the usual ratio, calling for twice as much fat as meat. Why would this be? Anyone out there understand why it would take more fat to achieve a stable emulsion when the fat is warm or hot?

Update, a few hours later:

Whew! I barely had time to get some chickens in the smoker and clean my gutters before the emails started rolling in, asking for this recipe. Although there are quite a few steps, the pâté goes together quickly and turns out beautifully, so it’s well worth sharing. Just let me know how yours turn out as well!

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Tags: emulsion, liver, pâté, pork, terrine

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 9:57 am and is filed under Club Offerings, Feature, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.