Sous vide is a type of slow cooking; generally, food is vacuum sealed in plastic and cooked under water. Pâté—also called terrine and pâté en terrine—is typically cooked in a water bath, so I wondered if people are cooking pâtés sous-vide style and if so, how that works. After I did the research, I figured you might like to know more about this subject too—and that’s why I put together this helpful article.

So, first off, can you make a sous vide pâté en terrine? Yes!

To sous vide pâtés and terrines, you place a traditional terrine dish in a pan or Cambro container with a sous vide immersion circulator. Alternately, you can cook your pâté in a lidless terrine by wrapping it in plastic, vacuum sealing it and submerging it in a sous-vide bath. Mini-pâtés can be cooked sous-vide style by putting the pâté into small mason jars and cooking them in the sous-vide bath.  

Now you know that it can be done, let’s dig into how to sous vide pâtés and terrines and explore the pros and cons of sous vide for pâtés. Plus, I’ll link to a few recipes that can get you started on your sous-vide-pâté lifestyle, if that’s what you want. But first, let’s have a quick refresher on what the heck sous vide cooking is!

What is sous vide cooking?

Sous vide is the process of cooking vacuum-sealed food in plastic or silicone baggies submerged in a low temperature water bath (temperatures range from 120°F (49°C) to 190°F (87°C)). Food can also be cooked in glass mason jars though these aren’t generally submerged entirely or vacuum sealed (though you can do both).

The equipment required to create this low temperature water bath ranges from basic to fancy. The basic option is putting a pot on a stove and carefully monitoring the temperature with a digital thermometer.

The mid-range option is using a sous vide immersion circulator in a pot or a plastic Cambro container. The Cambro container works better than a pot because plastic is a better insulator and these containers are generally square or rectangle which allows you to cook more items at a time.

The fancy option is buying a separate sous vide machine entirely; it’s called a sous vide water oven. This isn’t necessarily fanciest in price because some immersion circulators cost the same as a water oven.

Sous vide is becoming popular for home chefs as you can cook practically anything sous vide style! This includes meat (edge-to-edge rare steak!), seafood, many vegetables, grains, beans, desserts, custards and even Hollandaise sauce.

The basic process for sous vide cooking is:

• Put your food in a sous vide baggie (made of plastic or silicone) or mason jar.
• Prepare the sous vide water bath according to your recipe.
• Submerge the food in the water and cook for the time specified in your recipe.
• Once cooked, sear as necessary (for example, with a steak).

As for speed, sous vide is a type of slow cooking. According to the Cooking Times & Temperatures article at Sous Vide Supreme, cooking pork belly the quick way takes five to eight hours while the slow way takes 24 to 72 hours. At the other end of the time spectrum, sous vide scrambled eggs take 20 minutes and tender vegetables can be finished in 30 to 90 minutes.

Okay, let’s get to the options for cooking pâtés and terrines with the sous vide method.

Option 1 for pâtés and terrine, sous-vide style: Use your (lidded) terrine mold

You can sous vide your favourite pâté or terrine recipe in your traditional lidded terrine mold. In this type of sous vide situation, you replace the oven water bath with a sous vide water bath that sits on your countertop.

You simply put your terrine dish in a water bath that’s heated with a sous vide immersion circulator (or use your sous vide water oven) and cook it until it’s done. The water bath goes to the upper edge of your terrine, just as it would in an oven water bath. Don’t let the water level get high enough to sneak into your terrine mold or you will cry.

Cooking a standard-sized terrine takes about two hours by sous vide, which is longer than many recipes that call for cooking in the oven (but it depends on the recipe, of course).

[By the way, if you’re contemplating buying your first proper terrine mold and you’re a little overwhelmed by the options, check out my article, 11 Tips for Buying or Procuring Your First Terrine Mold.]

Option 2 for pâtés and terrine, sous-vide style: Use any loaf plan plus a plastic seal

Even without a proper terrine mold with a lid, you can still sous vide a pâté using whatever you’ve got.

A loaf pan meant for bread or meatloaf is just fine. (If you use a bread pan, use one with a non-stick coating or one made of Pyrex, stainless steel, porcelain etc. Not one of those old rusty tinned steel pans.) Size wise, I found my meatloaf pan too big for pâté, but I have a smaller Pyrex loaf pan that works great.

To sous vide your terrine in a loaf pan, you prepare the pâté and put it in the loaf pan. Then you put the whole thing in a plastic sous vide bag, suck out all the air and vacuum seal it. Once it’s sealed up tight, the whole pâté can be submerged in the water bath for cooking.

How to seal your pâté en terrine

Since you’ll cook your pâté en terrine literally under water, a few layers of cling wrap won’t be sufficient. Fortunately, there are tools for sealing plastic together. The basic tool is called a vacuum sealer which does two things: sucks the air out of the baggie and seals the plastic so air or water can’t get in. FoodSaver is a popular brand (even I’ve heard of it, ha ha) but there are lots of options for vacuum sealers. When I looked, they were mostly in the $35 to $200 (CAD) range. One outlier was $705 but that was for commercial use.

The other option—which would technically be better for a wet pâté—is a chamber sealer. According to the Chef Steps article, How Chamber-Style Vacuum Sealers Work, “Unlike edge-style sealers, the pressure in the chamber and inside the bag are nearly always the same, so the sous vide bag never collapses. This approach has the advantage that liquids tend to stay put rather than being sucked out the open edge of the bag.”

However, let’s get real about our needs as home cooks. At the time of me writing this article, a chamber sealer costs between $380 and $1,100 CAD. You’ll be fine with a vacuum sealer.

Option 3 for pâtés and terrine, sous-vide style: Make mini pâtés with mason jars

Another way to cook pâtés sous-vide style is in mason jars. Smaller mason jars like a one-cup, wide-mouth mason jar or a quarter-cup, regular-mouth mason jars are best in terms of final presentation (a short jar is better to spoon pâté out of than a tall jar).

Using mason jars to sous vide pâté:

• Eliminates plastic waste.
• Keeps your pâté fresher longer – If you have multiple small jars of pâté, instead of a large loaf, less of  your pâté is exposed to air at a time, which keeps it fresher, especially if you seal the top of each jar with a layer of fat. Of course, you could also achieve this by sealing slices of pâté with your vacuum sealer.)
• Makes a perfect size hostess gift.

Pros of making sous vide pâtés and terrines

The pros of making sous vide pâtés and terrines include:

• More space in your oven – For big events—or even if you have a big family with hungry mouths—oven space is always at a premium. Having a sous vide set-up on your counter lets you keep the oven for cooking other dishes.
• Less heat in the summer – Turning on the oven in the summer gets me dirty looks around here. Anything that keeps the oven off in the summer sounds good to me. Though I wonder if it makes the kitchen hot and humid. If you know, let me know, please and thanks!
• Knowledge of this foodie trend – Sous vide is taking the cooking world by storm and if you like to keep up with this stuff, you’ll want to give it a try. Plus, you can cook so many other foods with sous vide, you’ll probably use it a lot, even if you don’t cook pâtés often.

Cons of making sous vide pâtés and terrines

The cons of making sous vide pâtés and terrines include:

• Using plastic more often – Each thing you cook in plastic goes right into the garbage can when you’re done. While plastic is handy in the kitchen, you might not want to add more of it to your kitchen routine. To get around this, you can sous vide in mason jars and reusable silicone baggies (which work to counteract the next point too).

• Eating food cooked in plastic – Many people believe it’s safe to cook food in “food safe” plastic. According to the Cook’s Illustrated article, Is Sous Vide Safe?, “High-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, and polypropylene are considered the safest plastics. Many name-brand plastic bags are made with polyethylene and polypropylene. These types of plastic are resistant to the sub-boiling temperatures involved in sous vide cooking, and they are also considered safe in and of themselves.” I’m skeptical of this safety claim so I don’t cook or reheat my food in plastic.

• Cluttering up your kitchen – A sous vide system is another gadget that you may or may not have the space for. Whether it’s worth it depends on how much you like sous vide food and how often you’re going to use it.

• Waiting longer for your pâté to cook – Because sous vide uses very low temperatures, it’ll take your pâté (and many other items) longer to cook than more traditional methods. However, if you’re home anyway, this isn’t a big deal. Especially since you have to weight your terrine overnight anyway so it’s not like sous vide will slow down your terrine eating today.

Even though that’s double the cons than the pros, I really don’t think you need to put sous vide on the “don’t do” list if it interests you.

Recipe suggestions for making sous vide pâtés and terrines

Here are some recipes for making your pâtés and terrines the sous vide way:

1. Million-Dollar Country Pâté: A Simple Recipe That Looks (and Tastes!) Like a Million Bucks by the folks at the Chef Steps site. This is the one where you put your lidded terrine mold in the water bath, no plastic necessary.

• Pâté de Campagne en Sous Vide, a recipe by Evan Brady, on The Daily Brine website. In this recipe, you use a regular loaf pan, seal it in the sous vide plastic baggie and cook it under water for about two and a half hours.

• Chicken Liver Pâté by the Chef Steps staff. This one is for creamy, spreadable pâté cooked in mini mason jars. Yum.

• Sous Vide Chicken Liver Pate with Onion Jam by Hanan Evyasaf on his Cook Like A Chef at Home blog. This recipe calls for cooking the livers under sous vide before mixing them in with all the other pâté ingredients. In the comments section of this recipe, reader Paul praises this method because “chicken livers can get bitter by overcooking. The problem arises on how to cook them sufficiently that they are pasteurized, but not overcooked that they become bitter…” The sous vide technique deals with this over cooking issue nicely.

Conclusion

So, yes, you can sous vide spreadable and sliceable pâtés and terrines, with and without plastic. If you already have a sous vide immersion circulator or sous vide water oven, there’s no reason not to try sous vide pâté. And if you’re thinking of getting an immersion circulator, pâtés and terrines are just a few of the many foods you can cook under vacuum. May your sous vide experiments always be delectable!