Maple-Whiskey Venison Liver Pâté

Preparation

• Night Before
• Place the chunks of liver into a bowl and cover with the buttermilk. Put in the fridge and leave overnight.
• Day Of
• Drain the buttermilk out of the bowl and rinse off the liver under cold water.
• Melt 2 tablespoons butter or duck fat in a frying pan over medium-high heat.
• Add the liver and sprinkle on a generous pinch of kosher salt and black pepper. Fry until the outside has browned, but the inside remains just slightly pink. You can continually cut into the liver pieces to check on their progress as you will be grinding it all up later.
• Remove the liver from the pan to a bowl, reduce the heat to medium, then add the onions and garlic to the pan and cook until they’re softened and translucent.
• Once the onions and garlic are cooked, add the liver back to the pan, then add the whiskey, stirring it around and scraping up anything that stuck to the bottom of the pan. Do this off the burner if using a gas or live fire stove.
• Transfer everything into a bowl.
• If Using a Food Processor
• Dump the bowl into the food processor and run until the ingredients become a coarse paste.
• You can stop here and keep it as a coarse, rustic pâté, or continue running the food processor until it forms a smoother, finer paste, it is up to you. Try a small spoonful at each stage to see what type you prefer.
• If Using a Meat Grinder
• Run everything in the bowl through a coarse dye on the meat grinder, collecting it all into a medium bowl.
• You can stop here and keep it as a coarse, rustic pâté, or switch to a finer dye and run everything through the grinder again. Try a small spoonful at each stage to see which you prefer.
• If Using a Knife
• Dump the contents of the bowl onto a cutting board and begin chopping it all with a large chef’s knife.
• Continue chopping until everything has become a fine mash, then begin using the side of the blade to scrape the ingredients across the cutting board in long sweeping motions. This will help turn the chopped liver into a paste.
• Keep chopping and scraping until you have a fine paste (then go and look for sales on meat grinders).
• Final Steps
• Mix the maple syrup and cream into the paste, whipping it in well with a fork. Taste for seasoning: add more salt, pepper, whiskey, or maple syrup if desired.
• Optional
• If you desire a very fine and creamy pâté, you can dump the bowl into a fine wire mesh strainer and begin pressing and scraping the paste through the strainer into a bowl with a metal spoon. Keep scraping and scraping, until all that you are left with is a couple clumps of stringy bits that won’t pass through. Continue on to the next step.
• Press the pâté (whether it is coarse, fine, or superfine) into a mason jar or other suitable container.
• Melt the other 2 tablespoons (30mL) of butter or duck fat, then pour it over the pâté, creating a cap. If there is still some pâté poking through, melt more fat and add to it until everything is submerged. Put the jar in the fridge and let the fat cap set and harden.
• The pâté should keep for about 1 week with an unbroken fat cap. Once the fat cap is broken, use within 3 or 4 days. Enjoy!