If you've already come to understand and
appreciate that liver is the most
nutritious food on the planet and you
just can't stand the taste or you can
tolerate it but you just wish in some
other world it could taste better than
it does, then this video is for you.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com and you are
watching Chris Masterjohn Lite, where
the name of the game is
Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!
And today we're going to talk about five
ways to make liver taste better. Now in
the last video I told you five ways to
eat enough liver. Four of those ways
were ways that were either easier or more
convenient or milder tasting than
cooking fresh liver. Today we're going to
zero in on that first way of cooking
your own fresh liver. We're going to
assume you're cooking fresh liver.
What can you do to make it taste as good
as it possibly can?
This is not a recipe, it's a list of core
principles that you can apply to any
recipe to get the most you can out of
the enjoyment of that meal. So principle
number one. You want to find the right
species of liver. A lot of people ask
about the differences in nutrition
between different livers. Well there's
something to be said for that but the
only liver that's going to give you good
nutrition is the liver that you enjoy
enough to eat it sustainably, and in that
sense you really want to think about the
taste and texture. So I personally have
found that beef liver tastes too strong
and that chicken liver and lamb liver
don't have the right texture. They're
either too mushy or they don't have the
right integrity, so I've always enjoyed
bison liver the most. Now you're not
necessarily going to get the same
mileage that I am but you should
experiment with some different species
of liver to see which one you like the
taste and texture of the best. And when
you find that one, go with that.
Principle number two is you want to get
the liver as fresh as you possibly can.
So never, never, ever, ever buy liver that's
in the refrigerator in a grocery store.
That liver is already going bad. In the
ideal world what you would want to do is
get it fresh from a butcher when it was
slaughtered that day. If you can do that,
that is awesome.
The next best thing is to buy liver in
its frozen state when the company had
frozen it as fast as possible after
slaughter and processing. For me, since I've
always loved bison liver, I've purchased mine
from North Star Bison. It's always been
delivered fully frozen and I've always
been satisfied with the freshness of it
once I thaw it out. A member of our
community Katherine Morrison recommended
White Oak Pastures as a source of fresh
liver. White Oak Pastures is one of the
two farms in the United States that
slaughters and processes their meat in
their own facility and that means that
they're able to freeze it in the
freshest state possible.
The fresher the liver is, the better it's
going to taste. Now,
principle number three is that once you
have the liver you have to keep it fresh
as good as you can, and that means that
it's either going to be in your freezer
or it's going to be thawing out in your
refrigerator and cooked soon after, and you
should never be thawing out more than
you're going to eat in one sitting.
So what I do is I don't thaw the liver
but I partially thaw it so that it's
mostly still frozen but it's just soft
enough to cut through, with a little
elbow grease, with a knife, and I
cut it into portions that i'll eat in
one sitting and I refreeze it so that I
never have more than i'm going to eat at
one time thawing out in the refrigerator.
Principle number four is you want to
marinade it in something that's going to
preserve the sensitive compounds to
prevent cooking from generating too intense of
a flavor, and that can be something
acidic like lemon juice or wine vinegar
or it can be milk. When you marinade it
you want to marinade it at least for a
couple hours and you might want to
marinade it overnight.
Principle number five is to cut it as
thinly as possible and to cook it as
lightly as possible.
The larger the size of the bites of
liver you have, the more likely it is to
stimulate your gag reflex, and at the
same time if you cut it thinly it's very
easy to overcook it, and overcooking
liver really brings out the flavors that
people don't like. So cut it very thinly
and cook it for no more than a minute on
each side. Now with those five principles
what you want to do is use a recipe you like,
and that's going to vary from person to
person.
All right I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com and I will
see you in the next video.