In Russian cuisine, the liver is not in honor. It is interpreted as "viscera", lower-grade meat, like the stomach, heart, kidneys, and brains. But in the national cuisines of other countries, liver (it is the liver) is a delicacy. What just do not cook from it! Pâtés, crepes, mousses, cutlets and even cake. But did you know that the famous French delicacy foie gras is nothing more than a specially prepared goose liver? In addition to the fact that liver is very tasty, it is also extremely useful. But many chefs who do not know the secret of cooking the liver are disappointed in this product. An inexperienced cook’s liver can turn out to be dry, sinewy, firm as the sole of a sneaker, and even incredibly bitter. The liver acquires all these unpleasant qualities due to its improper processing. But if you approach the matter wisely, the liver will surprise you with a delicate taste and an unforgettable characteristic aroma. In this article, we compiled a selection of liver recipes. We hope that with its help you enrich your menu and delight loved ones with delicious liveries.
The benefits and harms of the liver
Since ancient times, people considered this product a panacea for anemia. And this is not surprising, because in any liver there is a lot of iron, which gives the liver a little metallic taste. And this mineral is necessary for the biosynthesis of hemoglobin and the production of blood cells. Beef liver and spinach are still the best remedy for anemia. Liver also contains a large number of amino acids, including valuable arachidonic, docosahexaenoic and eicosapentaenoic. If you have weak hair, brittle nails and an unhealthy skin color, you just need to learn the secrets of cooking the liver, because this product contains the entire line of vitamins B that you are missing. A liverier is also useful for people with shaky nerves. Vitamin B12 calms, helps to cope with unreasonable anxiety and insomnia. Of the useful minerals, in addition to iron, the liver is rich in copper, which is responsible for the normal functioning of cells. It is worth leaning on the liver to those people who want to have sharp eyesight. After all, the product also contains retinol (vitamin A). The same substance strengthens the immune system. But who needs to use the liver with caution is people suffering from cardiovascular diseases. The liver contains cholesterol, which provokes the appearance of atherosclerotic plaques.
How to choose a liver
Try to buy chilled rather than frozen food. First, look at the color. In a beef liver, it is like a ripe cherry, in a pig - a reddish-brown shade. The liver of the bird is lighter. Chicken liver is light brown, and turkey is more red. The most delicious is veal liver. Its color varies from dark beige to red.
Sometimes the preparation of the liver is simply doomed to failure, since the animal’s gall bladder was torn when the carcass was fresh, and the liver became bitter. A good product has neither blood clots nor dark spots on the surface. Press lightly on the liver. It should be soft, but firm, moistly shiny. Now sniff. A good liver has a metallic smell. Sour spirit indicates spoilage of the product. If you still have to buy a frozen liver, make sure there are no yellow or orange spots on it. They indicate that the product was thawed and stored incorrectly. It is desirable that the liver rest in its own "packaging", that is, in a natural film, without damage and scratches.
Product processing
Whatever animal liver you may have acquired, and whatever recipe you choose, you need to start the culinary process with the preliminary preparation of the liver. Photos will make our instructions more understandable. First of all, you need to remove the liver from its film. This is a pretty complicated procedure. Rather, it will be easy to do with beef liver. Its film is durable and resembles a nylon stocking. To make it easier to pull it off from the liver, put the whole piece for half an hour in the freezer. And the cook’s pork liver, on the contrary, is recommended to hold for 20 seconds in boiling water. Liver birds can be held for 10 minutes in warm water. After that, you need to pick up the edge of the thin film with the tip of the knife and pull it towards yourself, smoothly, but confidently, without making sudden movements. After cleaning the liver, you need to cut out all the vessels and bile ducts. In order for the liver to lose its characteristic bitterness, cooks go to the following tricks:
- Soak in milk for about two hours. Also suitable are whey, buttermilk, kefir.
- Pickling in lemon juice.
- Sprinkle with baking soda. After this procedure, the liver must be thoroughly rinsed.
But the calf and bird liver do not need such preliminary manipulations. Especially if you decide to cook them in sour cream.
Easiest recipe
The similarity of a liver to seafood is that the longer you fry it, the harder it becomes. Consider the most basic recipe for cooking a liver in a pan. Four hundred grams of liver oil is washed, dried with napkins, cut into small pieces. We chop two onions in rings, and we rub the carrots coarsely. In a pan, heat a mixture of vegetable and butter. Roll pieces of liver in flour. We fry them no more than a minute on each side. Note: do not salt! Add onions and carrots. As soon as the vegetables are a little sautéed, pour half a glass of sour cream into the pan. At this stage, you can already salt the dish and season it with spices. Continue to fry for 5-7 minutes. Then turn off the fire, and insist under the lid for the same amount of time. Sprinkle with chopped fresh herbs before serving. This dish can be made from any liver. But beef liver should be soaked for at least an hour in milk before frying.
Having mastered the simplest recipe, you can complicate the preparation of the liver in a pan by adding other products. Liver in sour cream with mushrooms is very tasty. Fry 4-5 pieces of bacon in vegetable oil. We will take out the greaves, and put the liver in their place. Then we attach the onion to it. When they are fried, we dump the contents of a jar of pickled mushrooms with a liquid (about 300 ml) onto the pan. Pour a quarter cup of sour cream and two soup spoons of meat broth. Reduce the heat and simmer under the lid for about 20 minutes. We breed a couple of spoons of flour in a small amount of sour cream. Pour the sauce into the pan. We return there and greaves.
Liver cake
Not a single Ukrainian wedding is complete without this snack. And making a cake is very simple - if you have an effective blender at your disposal. Chicken liver is most suitable for the dish. Cake recipes are very different from each other. Here we give a classic version. Half a chicken liver is chopped in a blender. If you do not have such a device, just pass the liver twice through a meat grinder. Add 300 milliliters of milk, half a glass of flour, two eggs, salt and black pepper to the minced meat. Shuffle. The dough should turn out like sour cream. If necessary, add flour. Pour 2-3 tablespoons of vegetable oil into the dough. We bake pancakes in a pan. These are cake layers. And now let's do the “cream”. Grind three onions and four carrots in a blender. We spread in a pan with the addition of oil and simmer. Mix in a bowl a package (250 g) of mayonnaise with two or three finely chopped cloves of garlic. We begin to fold the cake. We coat every pancake with mayonnaise. Spread the filling of fried vegetables on top. The top cake is smeared only with mayonnaise. Garnish with a grated hard-boiled egg and fresh herbs. We send the cake to soak in the refrigerator.
Liver paste
Why buy a dubious store product if you can make a delicious liver mousse yourself? And from one piece of meat you get quite a lot of paste. For the dish, you can take any liver, except beef. But the most delicious paste will come out of the calf’s liver. We do not consider foie gras recipes here, as the goose is specially fed with fatty food all three weeks before slaughter. And it’s quite difficult to cook French delicacy at home. Pate recipes, no matter how different, can be grouped into two categories. In the first, the liver is fried and stewed. And then the pieces are ground to a paste consistency. In the second group, the liver is first crushed to a pasty state, and then, adding various ingredients, baked in the oven.
Consider the first option for cooking the liver according to the French recipe. We cut half a kilo of processed calf liver into large pieces. We chop the onion, finely chop the garlic clove. In a saucepan, we pass the vegetables on a mixture of butter and vegetable oils. We spread the liver. Fry to keep the damp pieces inside. Pour half a glass of white wine. Salt, add pepper, coriander, nutmeg. Five minutes later, pour half a glass of fat cream. As soon as the mass boils, turn off the fire. Pureed cooled liver in a blender. We put the masses in molds. Fill with melted butter. Cool, tighten with cling film and put in the refrigerator.
Mousse in the oven
Cooking turkey or chicken liver gives the cook the opportunity to save time and energy. The film of this offal is quite thin, it is not necessary to remove it. We cut 250 grams of liver to pieces and mashed in a blender. Pour into this slurry 30 milliliters of milk and a tablespoon of brandy. We beat in the egg, add spices (pepper, Provence herbs nutmeg, coriander) and salt. Squeeze a clove of garlic through a press. Carefully knead the mass. Add 30 grams of melted butter. Knead again and lay out the mass on the baking tins. We install them in a baking sheet with high sides. Pour boiling water into it so that the water level reaches half the height of the molds. We put in the oven and bake at 160 degrees for half an hour (calf liver). Cooking chicken liver requires less time - 15-20 minutes. A little longer (20-25 min.) Turkey liver is baked. When the paste has cooled down and its swollen top has fallen off, fill in the melted butter in the molds to create a layer that is protected from airing. We put in the refrigerator.
Pork liver: recipes
This type of liver is the cheapest. If you lubricate the liver with cut lemon, the film will separate easily. So that the offal does not bite and remains soft after cooking, be sure to soak it for half an hour in milk, cut into slices. Throw the liver to a colander. In a pan, heat the mixture of oils, pass the finely chopped onions. A 400 gram piece of liver requires one head. When the bow becomes transparent, we spread the pieces of liver. Cooking pork liver does not require much time. Fry for an average of ten minutes stirring. In a glass of sour cream, stir in a teaspoon of finished mustard and flour. This sauce is sent to the pan. Stir and simmer for ten minutes under the lid. Only then salt the liver to taste, season with spices. We squeeze out a tooth-second garlic through a press, dry aromatic herbs (cilantro, parsley). Boiled potatoes, rice, buckwheat, pasta will suit this tasty dish as a side dish.
Chops
Cooking beef liver, harder than other offal, requires some physical effort from the cook. But the result will not disappoint you. Chops from beef liver are very juicy and literally melt in your mouth. First, pre-process the liver. Remove the film, get rid of the bile duct. It will even be good if you buy a frozen liver. Then cut it into flat pieces with a thickness of 1-1.5 centimeters is not difficult. If we make chops, we don’t need to soak the liver in milk. Just lay out the pieces between the two cling films (or wrap in a plastic bag) and beat off with a wooden hammer. We work half-heartedly, without fanaticism. Liver, unlike meat, has a delicate structure, and can break to holes. Pour flour into one bowl, drive two eggs into the second and shake them with a fork. Salt the prepared chops, pepper on both sides. We put the pan on fire. Pour in vegetable oil. When it warms up, take a chop, roll it first in flour, then dip in eggs. Fry on both sides until cooked. The recipe recommends serving this dish with mashed potatoes or stewed cabbage.
Cooking chicken liver. Braised liver with onions
Fast, cheap, tasty, healthy - that’s what you can say about poultry liver dishes. Here we give some basic recipes that you can complicate by adding other ingredients (mushrooms, vegetables, etc.). A pound of chicken liver will need two onions. Liver my, dry, cut each into quarters. Bulbs are shredded in half rings. Heat the oil in a pan. Fry the onions. We do not pass it to a transparent color, but bring it to brown. Add the liver. Fry over medium heat for about seven minutes. As soon as the crust forms, salt and pepper the dish. Reduce the fire. Stew under the lid for five minutes. If necessary, add a little boiling water.
Salads
Especially tender snacks are obtained from the liver of a bird. Here is a recipe for one of the many salads. We prepare potato tuber and carrot, as for Olivier, in uniforms. Separately, boil 300 grams of chicken liver. Cool down. We cut these ingredients into small pieces, together with pickles and onions. Mix mayonnaise with a teaspoon of mustard. We season the dish with this sauce, not forgetting to salt it. And on the festive table you can serve a puff salad with chicken liver. Instead of potatoes and carrots, we introduce a hard-boiled egg into the list of ingredients. Onions according to this recipe must first be fried in butter with salt and pepper. Layers of lettuce are stacked in the following order: liver, onion, fat in which it was fried, cucumber, mayonnaise. You can divide all the ingredients in half, and lay out more layers - so the salad will turn out even tastier. Sprinkle grated egg and chopped fresh dill on top of the dish.