Baked Chicken Liver Mousse (Terrine-Style)

The French mousse de foies method: raw livers blended with eggs, cream, brandy and blanched backfat, strained, and baked like a custard in a water bath. Works with duck livers too.

Untested: not yet made in this kitchen. It is here for the Pâtés and Terrines section and is adapted from the source named in the Notes.

Ingredients

• 1 bay leaf
• 2 whole cloves
• 8 white peppercorns
• 2 allspice berries
• 1 large onion, finely diced (about 1 cup)
• 6 ounces salt pork backfat
• 1 pound chicken livers, cleaned and patted dry
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup heavy cream
• 1½ teaspoons kosher salt
• ¼ cup brandy

Directions

1. Heat the oven to 250 °F. Grind the bay leaf, cloves, peppercorns and allspice fine and pass through a sieve.
2. Cover the onion and backfat with water, bring to a boil and drain.
3. Blend the livers, eggs, cream, salt, brandy and ground spices on high until completely smooth.
4. With the blender running, add the fat and onion slowly, or the mixture will break. Blend 1–2 minutes more, then strain.
5. Pour into a terrine or ramekins and set them in a roasting pan lined with a towel. Add boiling water to just under the rim of the dishes and cover.
6. Bake until the center reads 160 °F, about 1½ hours.
7. Cool, then chill overnight.

Notes

Source Adapted from Chichi Wang, “Chicken or Duck Liver Mousse,” Serious Eats (“The Nasty Bits”). The page says “back until” where it means “bake until”.

How it differs from the other liver pâtés Pépin’s and Abé’s cook the livers before they are blended; this one blends them raw and cooks the whole emulsion afterwards, as a terrine is cooked. It is the liver version of a forcemeat baked in a bain-marie.

Food safety: chicken livers Chicken liver pâté is the most documented Campylobacter vehicle in restaurant food: of 28 US chicken-liver outbreaks in 2000–2016, 24 were blended dishes such as pâté and 26 involved undercooking (Lanier et al., Foodborne Pathog. Dis. 2018). Pink is not a reliable test in either direction. USDA and CDC say 165 °F (74 °C); Washington State University found that holding livers at 70–73.9 °C (158–165 °F) for 101 down to 26 seconds is safe for Salmonella and still leaves them tender and faintly pink (Poult. Sci. 2021). A probe thermometer is the only way to have both. For this recipe: the source’s 160 °F center is 71 °C, inside the WSU window, and because the whole mass is cooked in the dish there is no pink core to worry about.

The Pâtés and Terrines section’s Liver Pâtés page (/pates-and-terrines/liver/) covers the history and technique behind this dish.

The photo The photograph shows a sliced chicken-liver terrine at Brasserie Georges, Lyon, not this recipe.