Friday, December 21, 2018

Japanese Foie Gras Terrine?

I don't indulge in foie gras very often, but I found some frozen foie gras in Amika, a small scale grocery store for food business owners (but anyone can enter, no membership needed). I thought it was a reasonable price, 1200 yen for 100g, and I hadn't had it in a while so I decided to challenge my cooking skills.

The package included two small lobes of foie gras, so the first one I sauteed as a luxurious topping for a steak. I put the second one back in the freezer and planned to pan-fry it another time. But then I saw packages of pates in a specialty grocery store and it made me think of how much I miss foie gras mousses and foie gras terrines. I casually looked up how to make a foie gras terrine on the internet and found that it didn't look that hard, it didn't require a huge list of ingredients either. The only thing I didn't have was Sauternes, port wine, or any dessert wine. I didn't exactly want to go out and buy a bottle either since I only had 50g of foie gras to work with. It dawned on me that I did have mirin on hand! It's a sweet sake (rice wine) used for cooking in Japan. So I went about removing the veins, seasoning the liver, and then poured on the mirin. I then stuffed it into a little ramekin and put it into the oven at low heat.

Homemade foie gras terrine
 Voila! The terrine turned out a little rough, I could have probably used a bit heavier weight to press it down after taking it out of the oven, but it actually tasted nice. Mirin added just the right sweetness to it. The experiment was a success!

Terrine spread on some bread
I tried it with some bread, but the Japanese bread is a bit too sweet, a regular french baguette would've been better. I wonder if Japanese sweet plum wine (umeshu) would do the same trick in a foie gras terrine...




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