Paté

My dad is a chef, this means he likes to cook pretty much anything. For the past few months his obsession has been with bread. Every few days there has been a fresh new loaf of bread cooling on the kitchen table. It has progressed from simple no knead bread, to whole wheat sandwich bread, to sourdough baguettes made with his own homemade starter. I think that he is getting a little bored of bread though, so he has become pretty interested in charcuterie.

Just last week he made us pork rillettes, which were and still are completely amazing and delicious. For those of you that do not know what pork rillettes are, they are pieces of pork and pork belly and maybe other things cooked for a very long time then shredded and mushed together. Believe me, they are a lot better than they sound. Fortunately for the meat eaters in house (my dad and I) and some what unfortunately for the non meat eaters (my mom and sister) pork rillettes was just the beginning.

This week he decided that we should make paté, so on Monday afternoon we started out. We used mainly a Julia Child recipe for a country style paté from The Way To Cook with some of our own additions.

The prep time really wasn't very long and the prep was mainly easy. We started out by sauteing some finely minced onions in olive oil till they were soft. While that was cooking we lined a loaf pan in plastic wrap and then a layer of bacon for the outside of the paté.


We then had to get all of ingredients ready for mixing together this was mainly a lot of cutting and placing the food processor. First, we put ground pork in. Then my dad chopped up some liver and put that in. Seeing how easy that was I wanted to cut something up, so I volunteered my services for the chicken thighs. Unfortunately chicken thighs are not soft and easy to cut up like liver. I had to fight those things and after two or three I had to admit defeat and let my dad finish the job. It was rather unfortunate.


After putting the chicken, pork, liver, onions, cream cheese, and assorted spices in the food processor we were ready to combine it all. That took a rather longish time since there was a lot of stuff in the processor. When it was done though we got to cook a bit of the mixture to test the spices and that was exciting and delicious.

Once we knew that the spicing was correct and we had added the egg that we had forgotten, it was time to fill the loaf pan. I actually don't know how that was, since my dad did it. But I must say he did do a very nice job.


Then it all got boring. First, the paté had to bake for like two hours so that we could get an internal temperature of 160 degrees.


Then if that wasn't already a very long time for a 14 year old girl to wait, the paté had to sit in the fridge with a five pound weight on it for a day to firm up.


Luckily the wait was worth it. The paté looked great and tasted just as good.


Now the most important questions. Is it good? Of course. Is it the best paté I've ever had? Ehh maybe not, but we did make it at home with out fancy gadgets. And last but not least, will we be able to eat the whole thing? That I really don't know. It seems enormous.