Foie Gras au Torchon (adapted from The French Laundry Cookbook)
1 foie gras
Milk to cover
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon sodium nitrite (pink salt, optional)
Marinate the foie gras in milk for a day, refrigerated.
Follow the above technique for deveining, seasoning, wrapping, poaching and so on.
Notes:
The French Laundry soaks in milk before deveining; I think it’s more effective to disrupt the vessels first, then soak—takes out more blood.
French Laundry uses white pepper, I believe for cosmetic reasons. To me white pepper has an unpleasant chemical taste so I never use it; I don’t mind the black specks.
You can purchase whole foie gras from Hudson Valley Foie Gras, linked to above.
If this is your first time, you may think 90 seconds in hot water isn’t nearly enough time to cook anything so fat. In fact, you aren’t really cooking this, you’re more or less melting it all back together again. Foie gras is mainly fat so, unlike the moist protein environment of meat, it’s not very hospitable to bacteria. Plus it’s soaked and cured for a day. You could probably eat one raw, veins and all, straight out of the bag without worry.
Remember that foie is maleable. It’s composed mainly of fat. If you wanted, you could poach it, then pack it into a terrine mold, and weight it down to compress it, then chill it. That would work great too. In Return to Cooking Ripert does this, only he layers in some mango which is an awesome pairing with foie gras.
Finally, if you were in a hurry, you could do the steps in Day 1, 2, and 3 in one day and have a finished torchon tomorrow.