After I made rillettes for the first time, I ended up with a large dish of them in the back of the fridge and started to wonder how long they last. Since I didn’t know, I did some research and decided to write a helpful post on what I found out about how long rillettes keep.
How long do rillettes last?
Rillettes can last in the fridge from several weeks to two or more months if they’re pressed tightly into a jar and covered in fat. Vacuum-sealed rillettes can keep for 18 months in the freezer.
Many people think it’s okay to keep condiments for months but would have doubts about keeping a meat-based dish in the fridge for weeks or months. But, once you understand why rillettes keep so well, you’ll have the faith to eat them, even if they’ve been stored a while.
More information about preserving rillettes
The first reason rillettes last so long is because of what they’re made of.
Rillettes are typically made of these ingredients:
- Pork meat.
- Pork fat such as fatback, pork belly and/or lard.
- Other meat such as duck confit, rabbit, chicken.
- Other fat such as duck fat.
- Spices.
- Aromatics such as garlic, leeks, onions, orange and lemon zest, etc.
- Stock, wine and/or water.
- Salt (more than you’d expect; rillettes are served cold and cold dishes taste less salty than warm dishes, so more salt is needed).
You can’t tell by this list, but rillettes are fatty. Extremely fatty. The high fat content is the first reason rillettes stay preserved for so long.
Preserving meat in fat is also known as confit. Confit is a traditional French cooking method where meat is slow cooked in fat so that it can be preserved without refrigeration. This method is popular with modern day charcuterie chefs as well; in my local butcher shop, I see confit duck legs for sale on a non-refrigerated shelf.
By the time these ingredients are slowly cooked together for hours, the water seems to disappear, and you’re left with a meaty, fatty mix. To make rillettes, you simply mash the cooked ingredients together. They’re so tender that you can do this with a fork. But a food processor is faster.
Once the ingredients are mixed together, all the meat is coated in fat which is the reason rillettes keep so long. It’s the same principle of confit, but with shredded meat instead of a whole duck leg.
The second reason rillettes last so long is because of what they don’t (or shouldn’t) have: air. The singer in the 1960’s British rock band, The Hollies, sang, “All I need is the air that I breathe,” but he certainly wasn’t talking about rillettes. The more air pockets you have within your dish of rillettes, the less time it will stay preserved. Again, this is just like confit; confit duck legs are covered in lard for storage and can last for months and years.
(Madrid, a commenter on Chowhound, said this about confit, “…I am far from a food safety expert and I am not a microbiologist….But…I did keep duck confit following Paula Wolfert’s recipes for 2 years in the refrigerator and it turned out fine.”)
While you may not be comfortable about the idea of eating meat that’s been preserved for more than two months, there’s a long history of potted meat being stored for months, even in the pre-refrigeration days.
Food for thought: A caveat about these time estimates
I found multiple answers to the question about how long rillettes keep.
The Daring Gourmet says rillettes last two months.
Hilarious chef David Lebovitz (who is fun to read) says, “Rillettes will keep in the refrigerator for one week to ten days.”
In their book, Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie, Brian Polycyn and Michael Ruhlman say, “Properly stored and completely sealed with the fat, rillettes will keep for up to a month in the refrigerator.”
And Quinn, a homesteader and blogger at Restoration Acres, says, “If properly covered with fat, pork rillettes should be shelf stable in a cool, dark place for up to 6 months.”
With that in mind, my best advice is to store rillettes well and learn to figure out if they’ve gone “off.” (See next two sections!)
How to tell if rillettes have gone bad
Use your eyes and nose before your mouth to tell if your rillettes are still good to eat. If the rillettes smell bad, look slimy or have mold, do not eat them. If the fat is rancid fat, it smells “off,” and unless you’re starving or living dangerously, it’s best to toss questionable rillettes into the green bin or garbage.
On the other hand, if it looks and smells fine, it’s probably okay. [Disclaimer alert! Much like Madrid on Chowhound, I’m not a food safety expert but I might have an iron stomach.]
How to pack rillettes well for storage
If you’re going to eat your rillettes within a week, you don’t have to be too fussy about packing them. But if you’d like to preserve them as long as possible, take a multi-pronged approach.
Step 1: Use small jars.
Rillettes are fatty meat covered in a layer of fat which is another preservation element. Once you crack that top fat layer, you expose the rillettes to air, which means they won’t last as long. So instead of using one big dish (like I did the first time I made them), use multiple small dishes instead. The second time around, I used multiple one-cup, wide-mouth mason jars and that worked out well.
Step 2: Press the rillettes and use some elbow grease.
When you put the rillettes into their pots, pack them tightly to remove large and small air bubbles. Put some of the mix in the jar, and pack that section down. Then repeat once or twice until the jar is mostly full (leave some space for the layer of fat). You can pack the rillettes down with the back of a spoon or a spatula.
Be firm and put some elbow grease into this part of the process. (Rillettes are so fatty, you may actually have grease on your elbows while using your elbow grease to remove the air bubbles, ha ha.)
Step 3: Cover with a warm fat.
Finally, add a generous and even layer of melted fat over the rillettes, then chill and store in the fridge. If you have a cold storage, you could use that too. (It could be a good experiment to put one small jar in the fridge and one in the cold storage and compare them one, two or three months down the road. If you do this, let me know how it turns out!)
Alternate method: Vacuum pack slices of rillettes
According to the Quebecois online grocer that specializes in organic meats, Mon Épicier Bio, “Vacuum-packed meat conserves for up to 18 months in the freezer, without loss of nutritional value.”
They sell rillettes by the slice in a vacuum-sealed package. If you have a vacuum sealer and would like to do this too, go ahead. In this case, it would probably be best to line a meatloaf or terrine dish with plastic wrap, pack the rillettes in and chill in the fridge. Once it’s solid, you can remove the rillettes from the dish (the plastic wrap should make this easier) and cut it into slices to seal.
And finally, if you’re like me, you’ve probably got one more question about storing rillettes…
Can you freeze rillettes?
In my personal experience, the answer is yes. I froze rillettes (and pâté) in mason jars and it turned out fine. Mona Pinder from Mona’s Table agrees with me. She says, “Pork Rillettes can be made up to a week ahead of time and stored in your refrigerator, or you can freeze them for several months…If you freeze them, defrost them in the refrigerator overnight before serving.”
On the other hand, David Lebovitz disagrees. He says, “I don’t recommend freezing them as charcuterie tends to get soggy, if frozen and defrosted.”
Rillettes may be the most forgiving of all charcuterie, so I recommend freezing a test jar and seeing how you like it after it thaws out. Then you’ll know!
Bonus: How to say rillettes
The first time I made rillettes, I went to the butcher shop and said to the meat hawker at the counter, “I’m making rill-ettes for the first time and I need some…” I pronounced those Ls. When he complimented me on choosing to make ree-ette, I was a tad embarrassed about my pronunciation faux-pas. Oh well!
The lesson here is those Ls are silent, as is the S (though in my brain, I always say the S, wrong as it may be).
Here’s a French guy saying rillettes (and how we would say this in Canada):
Conclusion
Okay, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading and may your rillettes be ever lasting!