OK, all you Nduja lurkers out there, hitting on this site just to get your pork fat and chili fix: here’s a recipe to rewind your minds and rethread your heads.

Nduja pâté. Yes, that’s Nduja – the crude and rude, rough and tumble, Calabrian salami that meatheads everywhere are plugging in to fire up their search engines – and pâté – the suave and elegant embodiment of classical French cuisine – together for the first time. A marriage made in heaven or al inferno?

What inspired such a culinary creation – besides the obvious explanation that I’m “crazier than a shithouse rat,” as Scott so succintly put it? It all has to do with texture. The Calabrian Nduja I had a chance to sample in London has a smooth, creamy texture, exactly like what you get from the Liver Terrine a la Parisienne in Frentz and Poulain’s Charcuterie book. Not surprisingly, the mix of meats is about the same, a 2:1 ratio of pork belly to liver. The final reason for nduja-izing pâté is pure greed. Pâté I can eat the same day, instead of waiting for it to ferment, smoke, and then slowly dry for weeks or months.

Here are the main ingredients for the meat mix:

1 kg chicken or pork liver, as fresh as possible
2 kg fresh pork belly
200 g Alfonso Esposito concentrato di peperoncini rossi “tipo speciale” picanti
140 grams Marinella brand Hot Pepper “powder” Piccantissimo Calabrese
50 g kosher salt
6 g cure #1

The procedure for making the pâté follows that for the no-paranoia Pâté Parisienne I already documented. I simply added about twice as much sautéed onion and garlic to the liver, left all the seasonings out of the milk infusion, except for thyme and bay, and substituted a robust Italian red wine for the Madeira. Oh, and the red bits are diced, roasted red pepper I mixed in at the end for a garnish. This recipe made a monster amount – 8-pounds of pâté – and, yes, the killer, cutting robot handled the whole batch with ease. After adding all the ingredients, the mix came right up to the brim of the 5.5 quart bowl, almost as if the recipe had been designed with this particular machine in mind.

One taste was enough to confirm that this is no sissified version of nduja.  The addition of the liver and the restraint with the spices did mellow it a little, but each bite still produces a nice, glowing afterburn, like a bed of smoldering coals on the tongue.  The roasted red pepper garnish was just the right touch, brightening and lightening.  A real winner!  I would recommend this recipe to anyone wanting to try nduja without breaking a sweat or without the fear factor induced by a raw, fermented salami.

A hat tip both to Scott, for supplying the Calabrian chilis – and the rest of his Sausage Debauchery – and to Porsha, for inspiring me to add liver to the Nduja mix!

Tags: chilis, fermented sausage, Italian, pâté, pork

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 7:20 am and is filed under 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.