There always seems to be a lot of dinner parties and get-togethers in the winter months. People like to sit around munching on appetizers before dinner, and usually one of the most popular is a pâté of some kind. Chef Jerry Pellegrino will tell you, as good as they are, they are something we can have fun making at home for ourselves.
To start, we’ll point out that there are three kinds of “pâtés”. You have the standard pâtés which are made from ground meat or fish, with pork fat, herbs and spices. They can be coarsely ground or finely ground. They are often baked in a crust or layered with slices of bacon. A mousse uses basically the same ingredients, but the mixture is whipped or processed until it is a smooth as a purée. A terrine (also the name of the container it’s baked in) is often more vegetable oriented, with coarsely chopped chunks of ingredient suspended in a gelatin mold.
Let’s focus on a pâté, and something most of us have heard of, a pâté de campagne.
It’s just a country-style pâté, a little more chunky than smooth. And of course there’s a million versions, but most of them involve two or more kinds of meat, often a game bird of some sort,
duck or goose, for instance. Liver comes into it all the time, pork liver, or chicken liver.
To start, you cut the meat into small pieces, add whatever combination of spices you want along with diced aromatics like onions or shallots. You then want to make something to act as a binder, which the French would call a “panade”. It’s simply cubed stale bread, milk and a couple eggs. Mix it all together and then mix the panade with your meat and finally add a splash of brandy or cognac. Then you’ll chill it down for an hour or so, which makes it easier to grind.
If you don’t have a grinder attachment for your stand mixer, you can use a food processor to give it just a bit of a chop to get all the ingredients blended well. But it should be coarse. Resist the urge to over-process. We do not want silky purée. As of now, nothing is cooked yet.
To do that, you’re going to want a ceramic terrine which is a long, narrow, deep baking dish, or you can use a conventional bread pan. What a lot of people will do is to line the terrine with plastic wrap to help unmold it later, and then thoroughly line the terrine pan with bacon or pancetta. You spoon the meat mixture into the terrine and wrap the long ends of the bacon over the top of the meat. You cover with the rest of the plastic wrap and put the lid on.
This will call for a very gentle form of baking, ideally a “bain marie”. You put the terrine in a larger, deeper pan, then fill it a little more than half-way up with boiling water. Then off it goes into a 325° oven for a couple hours. We will be shooting for an internal temperature of
155°.
Let it cool down and it’s almost ready to go. What is the top of the terrine will be the bottom of the pâté, so if it domed up during cooking you can press it down with something flat with weights on top… a couple big cans of beans for instance.
The usual method for unmolding a terrine is to dip it in very hot water for a few seconds, then use the plastic wrap to pull it out. It should pop right out, and you invert it onto a serving platter, and you’re all done.
You’d do well to chill it just a little bit and then reach for the gherkins and the Dijon mustard. Oh, a warm crusty baguette and a glass of Beaujolais will set you right up.
