Ive got a beautiful book from Marty to my birthday last year – The Eleven Medison Park – the cookbook – , and its full of amazing pictures and recipes.

Because we have a special attraction to foie gras – i found a beautifully interesting recipe which i really wanted to try since ive got the book. Usually im not playing with foie gras every day – so X-mas seemed a quite good opportunity… my Mummy brought me a perfect liver (1,5kg) so i made it.

• clean the liver and remove all the veins

• make your yummy marinade with cognac, Madeira, pink salt, sugar and white pepper

• place all in sous vide bag and vacuum seal, refrigerate for 24 hours

• after open the bag and discard with the marinade

• lay out 3 sheets of plastic wrap (cling film) on the top of each other and place the foie gras in the middle

• now i did roll out the liver – cause its quite messy i used a parchment paper on the top

• at this point the recipe different ( place the Foie Gras in a single layer on top of the plastic wrap – with your hands, break off pieces from the top end and place them on top og one another in a line across the bottom end… )

• after comes the flavor… originally i should use ground coriander but i prefer to try it with the chinese five spice – sift an even layer of it on the top of the foie gras

• after do the same with good quality unsweetened

  cocoa powder, sift a layer on the top of the five spice

• make sure to cover everywhere completely (at this point i was scared a bit, it seemed too much flavor and tiny bit of liver – but dont worry, our grade-A foie gras is just fatty enough to hold this amount of spice)

• roll the whole thing into a cylinder, pinch the plastic wrap at the ends and roll by holding the ends of the plastic

• place your ‘ballotine’ in an ice bath for 4hours – vacuum seal in a sous vide bag and poach for 5-6 minutes around 60 degrees
  (my torchon was really huge, i left in the waterbath for 20minutes)

• transfer into ice bath and chill for 12 hours before serving

footnote: one of my friend is pregnant – and she can not eat anything “raw” – just for ‘her sake’ i panfried the torchons outside a little bit – that caused serious damage in the outside looking – however u still can see the result in the middle and the flavour was just spot on

and we all were really happy… :)