Making a pâté en terrine—aka terrine—can be simple or difficult. Before I made my first terrine, I was a little intimidated by the process and I didn’t know much about the topic at all. So, I wanted to share what I’ve learned with you here to take the mystery (and intimidation) out of making pâté en terrine wrapped in delicious bacon. Plus, I’ll show you the main differences between the easy way and the hard way.

20 steps to making pâté en terrine the easy way (plus options for the hard way):

1. Choose your recipe.
2. Gather your ingredients.
3. Gather your tools.
4. Decide: to plastic-wrap or not to plastic-wrap.
5. Prepare the water bath.
6. Line your terrine mold (plastic wrap and/or bacon).
7. Grind the meat with chilled equipment (the hard way).
8. Mix the meat with the other ingredients.
9. Prepare your inlay (the hard way).
10. Check the flavour with a quenelle test (the hard way).
11. Put your ingredients into the terrine.
12. Cook the terrine.
13. Check for doneness.
14. Remove the terrine from the water bath.
15. Cool and press.
16. Chill overnight or longer.
17. Release the pâté en terrine from the terrine mold.
18. Tidy up the terrine.
19. Slice and serve.
20. Enjoy your accomplishment!

Now let’s take a closer look at each of these steps. I favour recipes that have few ingredients and few steps because I like to keep things simple. So, you might look at this list of 20 steps and think terrines are not for you. Don’t be intimidated by the number of steps! I wanted to break it down so you can see that each step is “doable.” And that it’s perfectly fine to skip the “hard way” steps. Save the hard way for later!

A note about terminology: Pâté en terrine versus terrine

Terrine is short form for pâté en terrine. En terrine means in a dish. So, what we’re making here is a pâté cooked in a dish/mold called a terrine. [If you wonder how the terms pâté and terrine relate to each other, check out my article, Are Pâtés & Terrines the Same? Mostly Yes: 10 Chefs Tell You Why.]

A note about pâté en croûte

The hardest way to make pâté en terrine is to decide to wrap it in pastry so it becomes pâté en croûte. We’re not doing that here today. We’ll save that for another time. When we’re brave and bold. [Can you see my life-long baking aversion shining through? Ha ha.]

Step 1 for making pâté en terrine: Choose your recipe

The first step is the most important because it determines the likelihood of your success. If you’re reading this, I’ll assume you’re an amateur home cook who isn’t into fussy recipes and that you’re new-ish to the world of pâté en terrine. Forgive my reader profiling.

So, for you, I recommend the same thing I do: Start with an easy recipe (and remember, you never have to “graduate” to complicated recipes—unless you want to).

Find an easy terrine recipe by doing one or both of these steps:

1. Search for “easy terrine recipe” on Google or your favourite search engine.

• Read the recipes online or in your cookbooks to determine which ones are easy. Two heuristics I use for this are the length of the ingredient list and number of instructions. If there are too many of either—or any part of the recipe is broken down into days—I become immediately resistant to the recipe. Whether that’s right or wrong is another matter but these two parameters have served me well so far.

Full confession: At the time of me writing this, I’ve never made a bacon-wrapped terrine! Since this section is about choosing a recipe, here’s the one I’ll use to make my first bacon-wrapped terrine: Country Terrine by Epicurious. [It does look like it has a lot of ingredients but seven of them are spices so that’s no big deal in my book.]

Step 2 for making pâté en terrine: Gather your ingredients

Unless your pantry, fridge and freezer are already stocked for French country cooking, you probably won’t be able to make your chosen terrine recipe with items on hand. Read the recipe carefully and write down all the ingredients you need (and where you’ll get them as you might need to make a special trip to the butcher and liquor store).

Many pâté en terrine recipes call for oddities like pork liver, quatre épices (four spices), a special type of brandy or wine, pistachios, etc. Who has them lying around?

When you’re at the butcher shop, buy the ingredients in the quantities the recipe calls for. Don’t get a pound of chicken livers if you only need three quarters of a pound. This way means you don’t have to worry about weighing at home or dealing with leftover ingredients like a goopy mess of chicken livers.

As terrines work better when you mix chilled ingredients, chill all your ingredients in the fridge or freezer. Unless it’s an onion to sauté. Sauté that first, then chill. Don’t let chilled ingredients become frozen ingredients.

Step 3 for making pâté en terrine: Gather your tools

In your clean and uncluttered kitchen, pull out everything you’ll need to make your recipe. This will include a bowl, perhaps a frying pan and some plastic wrap, your terrine dish, some utensils and a roasting pan for the water bath.

If you’re doing this the hard way, it also means pulling out your meat grinder, a bigger bowl and then putting those things in the freezer. More on that in step 7.

This makes it easier to follow the recipe without running around looking for things. Plus, if you’ve chosen an easy recipe, laying out all your tools won’t take too much space and they’ll get used right away.

Step 4 for making pâté en terrine: Decide: to plastic-wrap or not to plastic-wrap

If eating food cooked in plastic doesn’t concern you one little bit, jump on down to step 5 immediately. But for the rest of us, here’s what you need to know…

Many pâté en terrine recipes call for lining your terrine with plastic wrap, even the ones where you also line your terrine with bacon, fatback or caul. The reason for the plastic wrap is to make it easier to take your terrine out of the terrine mold.

I’ve lived many decades of my life avoiding putting my food in plastic, so this procedure disturbs me. [Don’t get me started on the sous vide trend.] But it’s not just me with my tin-foil hat on.

The Washington Post, in their article, Plastic wrap over the turkey: Is it safe?, says, “Even though today’s food-safe plastic wrap made for home use is free of the plasticizers, or phthalates, that could leach toxins, no manufacturers recommend using their product in the oven or having it come in contact with food during cooking.”

But maybe this doesn’t faze you. After all, the water bath means your food is cooked at a much lower temperature than the oven temperature. According to Restaurant Business Online, “[the water bath] should be at a constant 170°F/77°C. An oven temperature of approximately 300°F/149°C should keep the water bath’s temperature where it belongs…”

Against my better judgment, I used plastic wrap when I made chicken liver terrine. It did help me release it beautifully from the terrine but I’m not sure that was worth it to me. I’ll tell you next time.

Anyway, use your knowledge, judgment and gut to guide you on the question of plastic wrap.

Step 5 for making pâté en terrine: Prepare the water bath       

This step takes time which is why you need to do it before you even get your hands on the meat. It’s best to follow the instructions in the recipe you’re using. But in general, you want to preheat your oven to 300°F. Put your empty terrine mold into your roasting pan and fill it to the rim of the terrine with hot water from the tap. Remove the mold and put the roasting pan in the oven.

You can expect this pre-heating stage to last at least 45 minutes. Which is why we do it now, instead of later.

Step 6 for making pâté en terrine: Line your terrine mold (plastic wrap and/or bacon)

If you’re a-okay with the plastic wrap, use it to line your terrine mold. Cut off a piece of plastic wrap big enough to go into the terrine mold and be folded over the top once the stuffing is in.

Lining the terrine mold is actually a little trickier than it might seem as it can be hard to get the plastic wrap into the edges of the mold. I know this from experience. Sprinkling a few drops of water throughout the mold makes it easier to ease the plastic wrap into all the crevices. [I know this from book learning after the fact: Oops.]

Next (or first), it’s time to line the terrine with bacon slices. To make this easier, you can prepare the bacon beforehand. In Valentine Warner’s Guardian article, How to make a terrine – in pictures, he says, “Stretch each rasher of bacon on a board with the back of a knife to really flatten it out. This cuts down considerably on the number of rashers you will need and prevents the bacon overpowering the terrine.” [I wonder if a light touch with a rolling pin would also work?]

Then you layer in the bacon slices. Have each slice overlap the previous slice all around the terrine mold and make sure there’s enough of a bacon overhang to cover the top of the terrine once the filling is in there. Stretching the bacon probably helps with this too.

Step 7 for making pâté en terrine: Grind the meat with chilled equipment (the hard way)

Though I love the book, Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie byBrian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman, I haven’t jumped into their pâté en terrine recipes as they all call for grinding meat. Not only do you have to grind the meat, but you must do so while keeping the equipment and meat cool. Or else.

Sometime in the last few months, I read that this chill factor is so important is because if the ingredients get too warm, it’s more likely to break the meat and fat emulsion. The fat leaks out during cooking, leaving it greasy on the outside and dry on the inside. So, this is serious stuff but a bit much for me to take as a beginner.  

So, if you do the hard way of grinding, you’ll need to put the bowls, the grinder feeding tube, the grinder die and your small pieces of cubed meat and fat in the freezer. Then you create an ice bath by filling a larger bowl with ice. The smaller bowl (which collects the meat from the grinder) sits inside the icy bowl.

Then you grind your meat and fat according to the recipe. Some recipes call for multiple grinds; for example, you do it all with a course grind and then part of the ingredients again in a fine grind. When you’re finished grinding, rechill the mix in the fridge or freezer. Don’t let it freeze through.

If you want to know all about grinding and puréeing in a cold environment, I highly recommend getting Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie. This excellent book walks you through the whole process.

However, if you don’t have meat grinder or a grinder attachment on your stand mixer, then go back to step one and find a recipe that calls for already-ground meat.

Step 8 for making pâté en terrine: Mix the meat with the other ingredients

Now it’s time to mix it all up. Take your ingredients out of the fridge or freezer and put them in your stand mixer. Use your paddle attachment to mix it up. If you don’t have a stand mixer (OMG, neither do I!), you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Use a wooden spoon and elbow grease and mix until the blob gets sticky. Follow the instructions in your recipe but don’t overmix it.

Step 9 for making pâté en terrine: Prepare your inlay (the hard way)

An inlay is a large piece of meat or another ingredient that goes down the middle of a pâté en terrine. It makes for an interesting presentation when cut and enhances the flavour and contrast. It’s also called a structured inlay. Inlay examples include duck breast, boiled eggs and pork tenderloin.

This strikes me as a more advanced technique but perhaps I’m kidding myself. After all, you just put a few blobs of extra ingredients halfway though the filling. If you’re adventurous, you can try a structured inlay as a beginner. If not, forego this element. For now.

I might try (what looks like) a simple recipe that uses boiled eggs as the inlay, like this one: Chicken & Pork Terrine with Egg Centre from the Australian Eggs site. [I’m sure the recipe also works with American, Canadian and British eggs.]

To prepare your inlay, you either have to prep the boiled eggs or cut the meat to the shape you want and remember to keep your structured inlay chilled.

Step 10 for making pâté en terrine: Check the flavour with a quenelle test (the hard way)

According to the Great British Chefs website, “A quenelle is a presentation technique which makes a three-sided oval shape out of soft, malleable dish components, like pâté, cream Chantilly or ice cream.”

You can do a quenelle test when you make pâté en terrine to see if your pâté mix is adequately spiced/flavoured. Make a quenelle out of some of the mix, wrap it in plastic wrap (egads!), poach it and chill it in an ice bath. When it’s cool, taste it. Remember that since most pâtés en terrine are served cold, they need to be more heavily seasoned and salted than dishes served warm. This is because flavours are muted when dishes are cold.

If your mix is bland, you can add more salt and seasonings and do another quenelle test.

This is an extra step that—right or wrong—puts someone like me off. If you don’t want to do a quenelle test, that’s fine. Instead, choose your recipe carefully and then follow it closely.

Will I do a quenelle test for a pâté recipe from the amazing book, Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie? No, because I trust that these recipes are 100% delicious as written (and so far, I haven’t been disappointed).

Step 11 for making pâté en terrine: Put your ingredients into the terrine

Here’s where it gets real! Take your meat mixture and put it into the terrine mold. At this point, your terrine will already have a lining of bacon (and possibly plastic wrap). You can simply dump your terrine mix into the mold. [If you’re using the inlay, put half the mix in, then the inlay, then the rest of the mix.]

Once the meat mix is in the mold, press down gently with a spatula to remove air pockets. After that, fold the bacon (and maybe plastic wrap) up over the top of the mix and put the lid on. If you’re not working with a specialized terrine mold (yet!), you can cover the terrine with tin foil.

Step 12 for making pâté en terrine: Cook the terrine

Assuming your water bath has been in the oven for the recommended 45 minutes, you can start cooking the terrine. If your water bath is a big roasting dish, it will be unwieldly to remove from the oven. If this is the case, you can slide the rack out a bit and place the terrine mold into the water bath. Keep in mind, this might not work as easily when it’s time to take the terrine mold out of the water bath.

However, if it’s not too heavy or unwieldly for you to move, carefully take the water bath out of the oven, place the terrine mold into it and put it back into the oven.

To put the terrine mold into the water bath, you can place it on a large (and tough) metal spatula first and put it into the water, using tongs to support it. If you have two silicon oven mitts or gloves, you can wear them when you put the terrine mold in the water bath and not worry about burning your hands or getting them wet.

Set your kitchen timer for the cooking time recommended in the recipe you’re following. Then go read a book or do something else you enjoy until the timer goes off.

Step 13 for making pâté en terrine: Check for doneness

Before you take your pâté en terrine out of the oven for good, you’ll want to make sure it’s ready. There are a few ways you can make sure it’s cooked through and done.

Three ways to check the doneness of your terrine:

1. Use a meat thermometer – Follow the directions in your recipe as not all recipes use the same temperature to determine when the terrine is done. For example, in Leite’s Culinaria’s Chicken, Pork, and Pistachio Terrine recipe, they say, “[The terrine] should register 150° to 160°F (65° to 71°C).” However, in Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman’s Pork Liver Terrine recipe (from their book mentioned earlier), they say, “Cook it in the water bath to an internal temperature of 145°F/63°C, 45 to 60 minutes.”

• Use a skewer or toothpick – If the skewer or toothpick comes out clean, it’s done. This is less precise than the thermometer method but it worked just fine when I made chicken liver terrine, forgot to put a tin-foil cover on it and had to cook it way longer than the recipe called for. In Game: The Cookbook, Tom Norrington-Davies and Trish Hilferty suggest a different way to use the skewer. They say, “Insert a metal skewer or a small sharp knife into the middle of the terrine. It should come out hot. The best test is to hold it to your lip, not for too long thought. If it’s not hot, leave the terrine in the oven and look at it again after 10 minutes.”

• Use your fingertip – Leite’s Culinaria also suggests you can press the terrine gently with your fingertip to check for doneness. If it’s firm to the touch and juices run clear, then it’s ready!

Step 14 for making pâté en terrine: Remove the terrine from the water bath

Removing the pâté en terrine from the water bath can be tricky if your water bath is big and heavy or if you don’t have a sturdy spatula and tongs. If you do have a sturdy metal spatula and tongs, slip the metal spatula under the terrine mold, secure the top of the mold with the tongs and lift it out of the water bath onto a cutting board or trivet. Plan ahead so the distance between the start and the finish of this operation are close together.

Alternately, you can grab the terrine with your waterproof, silicon oven mitts or gloves and remove it. This is a quick operation so as long as your oven mitts aren’t cracked, you should be good and dry!

If you’re a little clumsy, go with the waterproof-oven-mitts method.   

Step 15 for making pâté en terrine: Cool and press

Pressing your terrine helps give it a uniform texture and shape and this step is easy. Let the terrine cool down enough so you can handle it. Then press your terrine with about two pounds of weight.

If your terrine mold came with a press, use that and add extra weight as necessary. If your terrine mold doesn’t have a terrine press, you can make your own with a piece of cardboard covered in tin foil. Use tin cans on top for the weight and spread them out evenly across the terrine press.

Step 16 for making pâté en terrine: Chill overnight or longer

Once your terrine is pressed, put it in the fridge to chill. You may be tempted to release the terrine after a few hours but don’t do it! Leave it in the fridge for at least 12 hours so your terrine is completely chilled when you release it from the mold.

This chilling makes it easier to get out of the mold and it gives the flavours a chance to mingle with each other. Kind of like how people say pizza tastes better the next morning. The Epicurious website, in their Country Terrine recipe says, “Chill terrine, with or without weights, at least 24 hours to allow flavors to develop.”

Step 17 for making pâté en terrine: Release the pâté en terrine from the terrine mold

If you used plastic wrap (zut alors!), releasing the pâté en terrine from the mold should be easier. In this case, wiggle the plastic wrap around the edges of the terrine mold to loosen things up and then flip the terrine mold over a (big enough) cutting board and watch as it slips out. Then remove the plastic wrap.

If you didn’t use plastic wrap, you need to nudge the process a little with another water bath. Put the terrine mold in hot water for a minute. This encourages the bacon to loosen its grip on the inside edges of the terrine mold. If this doesn’t seem like it’s doing the trick, you can gently insert a knife at the edge of the mold and slide it all the way around. Then flip it over as mentioned earlier.

Step 18 for making pâté en terrine: Tidy up the terrine

Depending on your terrine recipe, you may find bits of jelly here and there on the outside of your pâté en terrine. To tidy it up for a spectacular presentation, simply wipe away any gelatinous intrusions with a clean, damp cloth.

Step 19 for making pâté en terrine: Slice and serve

To make each slice of terrine a clean slice, dip or rinse the knife in hot water and wipe it clean after every slice.

JGraeff, a commenter on Kitchen Knife Forums (The Sharpest Place On Earth) says, “Make sure you do one continual slice and wipe the blade clean before each cut. I work with pate en croûte and terrines almost everyday, so I hope this helps.”

Serve slices of terrine with your favourite accompaniments such as gherkins, crusty bread, mustard, fig jam, etc. For more ideas what to do with your glorious terrine, read my article, Serving Terrine 101: How to Easily Create a Stellar Spread.

Step 20 for making pâté en terrine: Enjoy your accomplishment!

It’s time to celebrate! Your mission was to make a tasty pâté en terrine and … MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Eat your terrine alone or invite your favourite people to join you. They’ll “ooh and ahh” at your beautiful terrine and you’ll be proud of your work. That feels good, doesn’t it?

Conclusion

Making a pâté en terrine is about choosing the right recipe for your current skill level and enjoying the process. As you saw from this article, most of the steps are simple and you don’t have to take on the more difficult ones until you’re ready. Wishing you well in all your pâté en terrine adventures!