Chicken Rillette recipe! (a rustic pate)
So, summer's winding down and people are starting to plan holiday parties, and fall parties of various stripes, so we did a recipe this week for a party food! This is sort of like a rough pâté, it's really an ancient form of meat preservation. Roast the meat, then pull it apart and pack it tightly in with its own fat, usually covered in a layer of fat. It was originally done with pork, but more commonly today you see chicken, duck, or goose, and sometimes even rabbit.
There are endless variations to this recipe, and the spice mix you use at the beginning will determine a lot of the flavour you get at the end. One step we find indispensable is adding the fresh herbs (we used thyme, but sage works well, or rosemary if you want a more intense flavour) to the cooling fat as soon as the chicken comes out of the oven. It infuses the fat with that nice fresh herbal flavour and gives the final a great aroma.
The final product isn't quite smooth like a pâté, but has a nice rich texture and the flavour is just intensely chicken-ey. We love it with a little bit of mustard and some pickle (our kosher dills or the radish pickles on our channel work extremely well) on crackers.
