Paté Adventures

Four days ago was “Afternoon Tea Day.” I’m celebrating belatedly with morning coffee. A meme says Afternoon Tea Day is a great day for cake. I’m having homemade chicken liver paté on a couple of different breads.

You celebrate in your way, I’ll celebrate in mine.

I ran across a couple of Instagram reels demonstrating how to make chicken liver paté. One person was making paté specifically as an ingredient for his bánh mì. Readers might remember last month’s article, A Nice Summer Sandwich. I’ve been making and eating these at every opportunity.

The Nice Summer Sandwich is partly derived from bánh mì. So, as both a lover of chicken livers in general and paté on bánh mì in particular, I got busy.

I’m in the Detroit area currently, far from LA’s Thai Town. Luckily, Detroit and its environs have plenty to offer in the way of Asian grocery stores.

The simple recipe for chicken liver paté is, soak the livers in milk for a couple of hours, then discard the milk and rinse the livers.

Sautée onions and garlic till soft and add the livers. While they’re sautéeing, add whatever you want to in order to flavor your paté. Don’t overcook them, they should still be pink inside, but not raw.

For a little over one pound of livers I added a tablespoon of padaek, a tablespoon of regular fish sauce, sea salt, white pepper, a couple teaspoons of ginger-garlic paste, a teaspoon of crab paste, some oil from fermented black bean chili crisp, about 4 ounces of minced cooked kielbasa, and a tablespoon of butter (in addition to the butter in which I sautéed everything). That last tablespoon of butter should be added cold just before blending the livers in (don’t tell) my sister’s nutribullet or whatever it is (it’s okay, I washed it thoroughly right afterwards by hand and ran all the exposed parts through the dishwasher).

Then I chilled it till it was relatively solid, steamed it in its pyrex just to cook it that last little bit more, chilled it again, and voilá.

I think I would add some old dry bread rehydrated with milk to the mixture next time, as one recipe instructed.

The masterpiece sandwich goes like so: on a split bánh mì roll or baguette spread a healthy heapin’ helpin’ of that paté. Put on a mix of chopped mint, Thai basil, cilantro, culantro, and fresh lime leaf threads — I cut mine with an exacto knife. Sharper blade, more control.

Put a couple sardines on or a fish of your choice. Yes, fish with paté. If you can’t handle that … look, we are all going to starve once the supply chain breaks down anyway, so enjoy whatever you like while we have choices.