A few months ago I had a wonderful appetizer at Ron Gastro Bar in Amsterdam: a salad of chicken gizzards confit, celeriac, celery, and cream of foie gras. It also had crispy chicken skin and freshly shaved truffle, but what really stood out was the chicken gizzards and the combination with the celeriac and cream of foie gras. I don’t think I would have recognized them as chicken gizzards because they had been trimmed of all the connective tissue and were all pink tender meat. They were advertised as “confit”, but I had a hunch they had been cooked sous-vide. It was a fun combination of a low brow ingredient (chicken gizzards) with a high brow ingredient (foie gras). I decided it would be nice to do my own version of this one Michelin star dish. It turned out great!

I simplified matters and tried to make this with as few ingredients and as simply as possible. I had never made cream of foie gras before, but it turned out to be very easy and very delicious to make. I had never cooked chicken gizzards sous-vide before and found a cooking time and temperature in Modernist Cuisine, which is 12 hours at 60ºC/140ºF. I tried this and it was bad: the chicken gizzards ended up ‘crispy’. I know this is a strange thing to say about meat, but it’s the best word as I can think of. It was a bit like biting into a raw carrot. Edible, but not what I was after. So I used my own best guess based on this result and tried 24 hours at 64.5ºC/148ºF instead. The result was great: tender, juicy, and just like I remembered from Ron Gastrobar.

It takes a bit of work to trim all the connective tissue from the chicken gizzards, but other than that this requires little effort for such an original, tasty and decadent dish. And it only requires seven ingredients!

Ingredients

For 2 servings

300 grams (.66 lb) chicken gizzards

100 grams (3.5 oz) raw foie gras

50 ml (1/4 cup) heavy cream

1/2 celeriac

6-8 celery stalks

salt to taste

2 Tbsp butter or olive oil

Preparation

Rinse the chicken gizzards under cold running water. Pat them dry with paper towels. Trim any discolored or other parts that look like they should be trimmed. Season with salt.

Vacuum seal the chicken gizzards with the butter or olive oil.

Cook sous-vide for 24 hours at 64.5ºC/148ºF.

Take the chicken gizzards out of the sous-vide pouch and discard any fluids.

Now trim away everything from the chicken gizzards that does not look red/pink.

You could choose to eat everything as even the connective tissue has become tender thanks to the low and slow cooking, but it does not look as nice.

Slice up the good meat and discard the trimmings (you could use them to make chicken stock).

Refrigerate until needed.

To make the cream of foie gras, gently heat the cream in a saucepan and add the raw foie gras (roughly chopped, veins removed).

Stir over low heat until the foie gras has melted. Do not allow to boil!

Use an immersion blender to make it completely smooth. Add salt to taste. Resist the urge to eat all of it at this point. Yes, it is this easy to make cream of foie gras and it is this delicious. I like it even better when it has cooled off, so allow the cream of foie gras to cool and firm up in the refrigerator.

Wash and dry the celery stalks, and remove the tough strings with a vegetable peeler. Cut into pieces of about 10 cm (4″).

Cut the celeriac into sticks of about 10 cm (4″) long and 1 cm (1/2″) wide. Parboil them for 30 seconds in boiling salted water and then plunge them in cold water to stop the cooking.

Spread out a layer of the cream of foie gras on each plate.

Arrange the celery, celeriac, and gizzards on top. It looks nice like this, but to eat mix everything together.

Wine pairing

The cream of foie gras requires an aromatic white wine. We enjoyed this with a sylvaner from Alto Adige.

Flashback

I love salmon teriyaki and I love salmon cooked sous-vide to 43ºC/109ºF, it is amazingly buttery. If you like salmon teriyaki and have a digital thermometer but don’t have a sous-vide cooker,  do yourself a favor and prepare the recipe for salmon teriyaki sous-vide I shared two years ago using stove-top sous-vide. It only requires you to monitor the temperature of the pot for half an hour to keep it close to 43ºC/109ºF.