Making your own chicken liver pate is simple!

If you like pâté, you may want to make your own.  In Australia, finding good pâté is quite a mission, and when you find it, the cost is quite high. Making your own pâté is actually quite simple.  All you need apart from the ingredients is a food processor and a fry pan!  You will find chicken livers at any butcher’s.  It is worth going to a good butcher, chicken livers are cheap and at a good butcher you can be sure they will be very fresh and big. I also add pork mince to my pate to soften the taste. The rest of the ingredients can be sourced from any supermarket and you probably already have them at home .

The recipe I am giving here is the one for the pâté I make again and again, it is the chicken liver pâté.  I make it for picnics, for parties and for no special reasons.  I make a batch and freeze it, it keep really well in the freezer for two months, when you need it, just allow to thaw in the fridge for a day before use.

Last time I made it, the butcher only had duck livers left, the taste was different, delicious too! (it is always a good indicator when there are no left overs).

Other pâtés I sometimes make

I make other types of pates too, not as often, they are definitely for larger crowds than my little family circle and I do not have endless storage space either.  Mum used to make “country terrines” by batches of 20 or more jars, cook them in a steriliser and keep them in the cellar. We would have them for lunch as entrees or for picnics during summer.

Pork Rillettes

Rillettes are a type of pate, typically french.  Most people (and even my butcher) don’t know about them down here.  Pok rillettes are pork belly and pork shoulder cooked in stock for a long time and  mixed with pork fat.  The recipe I used is from Rick Stein and was published in Delicious magazine. Rillettes are also often found made with duck.

Ham Hock Terrines

Another nice onein the pate family are ham hock terrines.  Ham hock terrines contains blocks of meat and are essentially ham hocks that have been cooked for a long time in a stock and put together as a terrine with a binder.  There are different ways to combine the meat, I tried the following two terrines, unfortunately I did not take any photos:

• Ham hock terrine with jellified cooking stock.  This is another recipe from the Delicious magazine. You can find it online.
• Ham hock terrine with mustard.  This is an early Masterchef recipe.

Personally I prefer the second one,  one friend loved the first one and she was so over the moon with it, I ended up giving the whole left overs to her, she loved it!