What The Fork: Foie Gras to Kheema Kaleji, Kunal Vijayakar on the Finer Things in Life

There are a few sanctioned ways of cooking foie gras. Terrine of foie gras is actually one such unalloyed and faithful ways of cooking the liver. Slices of liver are layered in a pan along with a bit of French sweet wine or Armagnac (French Brandy). The terrine is then packed into a terrine mold, pressed down firmly to remove any air bubbles, making sure the liver is pressed into the corners of the tin and cooked at low temperature in a Bain Marie (water bath); once done, it’s chilled and sliced. I love terrines of all kinds, especially meatloaf, and a smooth liver terrine is a winner.

But the simply seared foie gras is what I love the most. Traditionally, foie gras is cooked by simply searing whole liver in a hot pan, carefully, because foie gras is soft and delicate and can melt easily. When simply seared, the foie gras tastes gently smoky on the outside and rich, meaty and buttery on the inside. Hélène Darroze at her flagship restaurant at The Connaught in London makes a heavenly pan-roasted foie gras with a coating of sesame seed, sobacha (buckweed tea) and toasted buckwheat, served along with melon and a sauce of Koji rice and sake. It’s too exotic for words.

And then there is pâté de foie gras. The most-touted and bourgeois form of eating foie gras. Available easily in jars, bottles and tins, and usually made from duck liver. Cooked foie gras is pureed along with brandy and butter to make smooth, gossamer, silky paste or a mousse which can be spread on crackers and devoured. At the restaurant Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London, they present chicken liver and foie gras parfait encased in mandarin orange jelly to create what looks like a small mandarin orange. It’s a scintillating stroke of genius, not only in the way it tastes, but also the way it looks.

But alas, foie gras is elusive as well as unthinkable in India so we have to make do with the goose’s déclassé cousin, the chicken and her liver. Chicken liver pâté or parfait is readily made in most fancy restaurants and appears on most charcuterie boards at Mumbai’s social dos. Even retro-classic home chefs and confectioners make tubs full of silky smooth chicken liver pâté and some of them are very good.