Pâté and Bread

If my goal in starting this blog and signing up for the Daring Cooks challenge was to break out of my comfort zone and cook and eat things I never would think to do otherwise, my second Daring Cooks challenge was a huge success! I probably would have gotten around to making enchiladas at some point in my cooking adventures, but pâté? Never. And bread? I was deathly afraid of baking. What a learning opportunity this turned out to be!

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.

I chose to go with the traditional chicken liver pâté. If I'm going to do pâté, I'm going to do pâté. No messing around with safe vegetarian or seafood options (who ever thought I'd consider seafood the safe option??). And the choice between French baguette and sandwich loaf was an easy one for this francophile.





Chicken Liver Pâté and French Baguette

Source
Daring Cooks June 2010 Challenge

Yield
3 average-sized French baguette loaves
1 loaf of pâté (the size of a regular meatloaf or bread loaf pan)

Equipment
Heavy-bottomed frying pan
Food processor
Loaf pan
Baking pan large enough to fit the loaf pan inside
Stand or hand mixer
Baking sheet
More bowls, spoons, knives and cutting boards than I have ever used. Ever. My dishwasher says to say thanks for nothing, by the way, Daring Kitchen :/

Pâté Ingredients
1 tbsp. Butter (recipe called for duck fat or butter. I really wanted to use the duck fat, but wasn't able to find it.)
2 Onions, coarsely chopped
300 g. Chicken livers, fat trimmed off
3 tbsp. Brandy (as I was having trouble getting it to flambé, I added about 1 tbsp. more)
100 g. Smoked bacon, diced
300 g. Boneless pork belly (which I couldn't find, so I used salt pork, minced)
200 g. Boneless pork blade, coarsely ground
2 Shallots, chopped
1 tsp. Quatre-épices (as the recipe suggested, I used 1/4 tsp. each of ground pepper, ground cloves, nutmeg and ginger)
2 Eggs
200 ml. Heavy cream
2 Fresh thyme sprigs, chopped
To taste, Salt and pepper

Pâté Directions

Preheat oven to 400ºF

Melt the butter over low heat in a heavy-bottom frying pan

Add in the onions and cook for ~5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft. Add in the chicken livers and cook for another 5 minutes, stirring more often, until the livers are brown on the outside but still pink on the inside.

Remove the pan from heat (important for avoiding unwanted fires!)

Pour in the brandy, and ignite the alcohol to flambé.

That didn't work. So I tried moving all of the alcohol to one side of the pan.

Yeah. That didn't work either. I added some more brandy, hoping that would help. It did, sort of. As you probably can't see, there are tiny, faint blue flames in the corner of the pan. Don't blink, you'll miss it.

The recipe says to tilt the pan to ensure even flavoring. I tried that, but every time I tilted the pan the flames would go out. Oh well, maybe my second attempt at flambeéing will be more successful :/

Set the pan aside.

In the food processor, combine the ground pork and minced pork belly.

Yum?

Add the onions and livers from the frying pan and the chopped shallots, and pulse until it's a homogeneous mixture (but not, as the recipe specifies, a slurry! I learned a new word today).

Is this a slurry? I have no idea.

Transfer to a bowl

Did this step really necessitate a separate line of its own? Yes.

Stir in the bacon,

spices,

cream,

eggs and thyme.

Season with salt and pepper and mix well.

Definitely looking forward to eating this...

Spoon the mixture into a loaf pan (the loaf pan being placed inside the larger baking pan)

and cover with aluminum foil.

Bring water to a simmer on the stove and add to the larger baking pan, about halfway up the side of the loaf pan. Place the baking pan and the loaf pan still inside of it in the oven and bake for 2 hours.

After 2 hours, remove the foil and bake for another 30 minutes.

This is what it looked like!

Notice the two differently colored and textured areas... not sure if that's typical, or if it was a result of insufficient blending in the food processor?

Cool for an hour or so, remove from the loaf pan, and chill for 8 hours in the refrigerator.

Baguette Ingredients
Starter:
     1/2 cup Cool water
     1/16 tsp. Dry active yeast
     1 cup Flour
Dough:
     1 tsp. Dry active yeast
     1 cup lukewarm Water
     Starter
     3 1/2 cups Flour
     1 1/2 tsp. Salt

Baguette Directions

Make the starter first (I did this the day before, as it takes 14 hours to sit overnight):

Mix the yeast with the water, then mix in the flour to make a soft dough.

Cover and let sit at room temperature for 14 hours.

The next morning when you check it, it should be pretty well risen and bubbly.

Now for the main dough. Mix the dry active yeast with the lukewarm water,

then add in the starter, flour and salt.

Move to the stand mixer

and mix on speed 2 until it's a soft, single dough.

Move to a lightly-greased bowl, cover and let rise for 3 hours.

After each hour, deflate and reform the dough, and let it rise again.

After the end of the 3 hours, put the dough on a greased work surface,

and divide into three semi-flat discs.

Oh, bread. You are so pretty.

Cover with greased plastic wrap, and let rise for 15 minutes.

After rising for 15 minutes, fold each loaf in half lengthwise, sealing the seam with the heel of your hand.

Flatten slightly, fold in half again, and again seal with the heel of your hand.

Roll into a log, and place seam-side down on a greased baking sheet, and repeat for the other two loaves.

Cover with greased plastic wrap and again let rise for 1 and 1/2 hours.

Pre-heat oven to 400ºF.

After fully risen, make three 8-inch diagonal slits in each loaf. Before putting in the oven, spritz heavily with warm water to ensure a crackly crust.

Bake until golden brown, about 30 minutes.

Because both the pâté and the bread didn't get done until nearly 9pm on a Saturday night, and, you know, a girl's got things to do on a Saturday night, I didn't serve them until the next day. Oh but it was worth the wait!

I was really unsure about this challenge. It was so new to me, I hadn't even ever eaten pâté, let alone made it. And honestly it was the cold meat thing more than the chicken organ thing that made me question it most. But I was astonished at how good it tasted. It was like the best slice of bacon I'd ever had, in meatloaf form. What could be better than that? And on my own homemade bread which I, somehow, didn't screw up. The bread was soft and crunchy at the same time. I was really more proud of the baguette than I was of the pâté itself!

I served it with three kinds of cheese, an American grana (meh.), Nettle Meadow Kunik (yay!), and Prima Donna (omg my new favorite holy crap is that ever a cheese).

I even convinced my sister and John to try it, and they didn't hate it! As for getting them to eat the whole loaf, though... let's just say I'll be eating pâté for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a really long time...