When I first “discovered” rillettes, I wondered what equipment I’d need to make them and if any specialized equipment was required. Now that I know the answers to these questions, I wanted to share them with you in this helpful (and reassuring) article.

What equipment is necessary for making rillettes?

To make rillettes at home, you need a lidded pot, oven (or alternative), knife, a stand mixer with the paddle attachment (or forks and a wooden spoon), rillettes pots with lids and a fridge, freezer or cold room for storage. If you cook regularly, you should have everything you need to make rillettes already in your kitchen.

Now that you know what you need to cook rillettes, you may want to know more about these items and other substitutions you can make for each of them. If yes, keep reading. But first, let’s define what rillettes are. And, as a bonus, I’ll provide you with some other rillettes resources to get you started on your first or next rillettes adventure.

What are rillettes?

Rillettes are a chunky meat spread made from pork and pork fat. Rillettes can also be made of pork (or boar) and other meats such as duck, turkey, rabbit, goose, etc.

In his book, The River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says, “Rillettes—shreds of highly seasoned pork (or duck or goose) preserved in their own fat—are one of the great inventions of the French charcutier. They are hard to find in the UK but very easy to make at home. The secret is the long, slow cooking of the meat in fat, so it doesn’t crisp up and brown but just melts and falls apart.”

All that to say, rillettes are yummy.

Rillettes-making equipment: Knife (and why sharp ones are better!)

To make rillettes, you need to cut up the meat and the fat into reasonably sized chunks. For that, you need a knife. Most chefs will tell you that you need a sharp knife. Using a sharp knife is best practice, but strictly speaking, a not-so-sharp or even a dull knife will do for rillettes.

According to The Food Network article, The Three Must-Have Knives, you only really need three knives: a chef’s knife, a paring knife and a serrated knife. And if you don’t eat bread, you can probably knock that serrated knife off the list. (Though according to the Knife Art article, Plain vs Serrated Knives – Which is better?, “ Serrated blades also work great on substances that are soft, flexible or can be crushed easily with downward cutting. Great examples of materials that work well with a serrated knife are bread, cooked meats, soft fruits and vegetables.” So maybe you’ll want to keep a serrated knife after all.)

To cut up the meat, you can use your chef’s knife. There’s generally not much more to chop up when making rillettes. If you use leeks and/or onions, you’ll only cut them in half so they can be easily removed at the end of the cooking process. Or, with the onion, you might not have to cut it at all if your recipe calls for studding it with a few cloves.

If your recipe calls for poultry legs (for example, duck, chicken or turkey), you don’t have to cut those up. Just throw them in the pot as is. (You’ll need a big pot if you go for a turkey leg as it needs to be submerged in the cooking liquid.)

Now back to the issue of knife sharpness. As I said, it’s better to have a sharp knife but you can get away with a dull knife with rillettes as there’s hardly any cutting involved. But if your recipe calls for pork belly and it comes with skin on, a dull knife will literally not cut it.

According to the ChefSteps article, The Benefits of Sharp Knives, sharp knives work better and are safer. About working better, they say, “Sharp knives need less brute force to cut than dull knives. Less brute force means less damage to the food.”

About safety, they say, “A sharp blade is predictable. When it strikes or is drawn across the food’s surface, it won’t slip … A dull blade will slip, which makes control difficult and increases the risk that it will slip into your finger.”

So even though there’s not much cutting to do with rillettes, it’s still a good idea to keep your knives sharp or at least not outrageously dull. [I’m saying this as much for my own benefit as yours!]

“Call me Captain Obvious but having a sharp knife will change your entire cooking experience.”

Jess Pryles, hardcore carnivore & respected authority on Texas-style barbecue

Rillettes-making equipment: Lidded pot

Rillettes are made with meat, fat and/or lard, spices and aromatics and stock, water or wine and cooked in a lidded pot for hours. The pot you choose to use should have a tight-fitting lid and be the right size for your ingredients.

Your ingredients should fit snugly into the pot so that your stock, water or wine covers the ingredients completely.

I generally use my three litre/quart enamelled cast iron pot for rillettes except when a turkey leg is involved—then I go bigger. I suppose I could saw the turkey leg in half to make it fit in a smaller pot but so far that hasn’t seemed necessary.

You don’t need a fancy Le Crueset pot to make rillettes, though it’s fine if you use one. An oven-to-table pot that looks like a work of art is always nice but with rillettes, you won’t be bringing the pot to the table to put it on show. It stays in the kitchen so nobody will know if you use a hideous or regular pot to cook your rillettes.

Rillettes-making equipment: Oven (and two alternatives)

Rillettes are generally cooked in the oven on low heat, such as 250°F or 275°F. However, if you don’t have an oven—or if it’s the summer and it’s too hot to turn the oven on for five hours—you have a couple of other options. [Related to the heat issue: this summer, I used the oven in my air-conditioner-free apartment to cook something, can’t remember what, and mentioned it to my also-air-conditioner-free neighbour. She said, “I would divorce you for that.” Ha!]

You can also cook your rillettes on the stove top. In their book, Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie, Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman use the stove top for their rabbit rillettes recipe. For this recipe, the rabbit and the other ingredients are submerged by the cooking stock and simmered for two to three hours.

If I had a choice between simmering something on the stove and in the oven, I’d generally choose the oven. This is because it’s easier to maintain a simmer in the oven. It’s a less fussy method and the pot requires less watching when it’s in the oven than when it’s on the stove. [I almost charred some fried onions at minimum heat on the stove just yesterday so perhaps I’m overly hesitant.]

In her article on The Kitchn website, Why I Cook Stew in the Oven (Not on the Stove), Meghan Splawn says, “Oven-baked stews heat from all sides rather than just from the bottom, which results in faster, more even cooking.” The first reason she gives is the same as what I mentioned above; I call it less fussy and she calls it hands-off.

Meghan says you can basically convert most stove-top recipes to oven cooking by cooking in a 300°F oven. This temperature might give the faster cooking she mentions. But cooking faster wouldn’t necessarily apply to the rillettes recipes I looked at since they called for lower temperatures of 250°F or 275°F.

The other oven alternative for cooking rillettes is your slow cooker. You basically follow the same process as for rillettes you make on the stove top or in the oven except use the slow cooker. With the slow cooker on low, it should take between six and eight hours to cook your rillettes.

If your recipe calls for lard or duck fat, you can melt that on the stove first (if you want) and pour it into the slow cooker dish. This isn’t necessary but it may give you a better idea if your liquid fat and stock, water or wine cover the meat and fat completely (which is what you want).

Again, with the slow cooker, you’ll want your ingredients to fit snugly into the crock.

I gave away my slow cooker last year because I just wasn’t using it anymore. I don’t regret that, but it was before I “discovered” rillettes. If I still had one, I’d for sure try out the slow cooker version.

According to the Rillettes de Tours section in the French version of Wikipedia, rillettes de Tours have a golden colour, are cooked for between five and 12 hours in an uncovered cast iron pan.

So, with the modern-day slow cooker, you’re going hours faster than you would if you were an artisanal rillettes maker in Tours, France, slaving over a simmering cauldron for most of your waking hours.

Recipe recommendation for slow cooker rillettes: How to Preserve Crockpot Pork Rillettes in Lard by Quinn on her Restoration Acres website. [Quinn reports that these rillettes are a hit with her five-year-old!]

Rillettes-making equipment: Stand mixer with paddle attachment (optional)

After the rillettes are done in the oven (or stove or slow cooker) and cooled down enough to touch, you remove the bits you don’t need. This includes the bones (for example, if you used duck legs), bay leaves, onions, bouquet garni, etc.

The next part is turning the ingredients into the rillettes. To do this, you can dump all the ingredients into your stand mixer and mix them up with the paddle attachment. Alternatively, you can strain out the meat, mix the meat and then add some of the liquid fat until you get the texture you want. Remember, rillettes are supposed to be fatty, that’s what makes them luxurious to eat.

By using the paddle attachment in your stand mixer, you break up the meat chunks and incorporate them well into the fat. Unlike chicken liver pâté, rillettes are supposed to be chunky, not smooth.

You can use a food processor or blender for part of this step—if you’re extremely careful and restrained about it.

In her 1967 book, Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, Jane Grigson says, “You can eliminate the pounding [of the rillettes] by dropping the meat onto the fast-whirling blades of an electric blender. This demands judgement, because you must not reduce the meat to a porridge-like slush.”

I wouldn’t recommend using the blender or food processor. If you don’t have a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, use the low-tech option in the next section. It’s easy.

Rillettes-making equipment: Forks and a wooden spoon

You know how it takes forever to make whip cream without an electrical appliance? This isn’t the case with rillettes. If you don’t have a stand mixer and paddle attachment, a couple of forks and wooden spoon will do just fine. Plus, you don’t even need any elbow grease for the mixing.

The meat in your rillettes is so tender that it falls apart with any resistance from a fork or wooden spoon, as does the fat.

So, all you need to do is mix up the ingredients until it’s a pleasantly chunky spread. As I mentioned earlier, if you don’t want to use all of the fat in the recipe, you don’t have to and, depending on your recipe, you may or may not need to. But you may want to as that’s the French way.

Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman, again in their book, Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie, say in their Le Mans Rillettes de Porc recipe, “Use all of the cooking liquid unless you feel that it looks too soupy (remember that it is gelatinous and will set up when refrigerated).”

[To read more about why I think Brian and Michael’s book is awesome, check out my resources page, The Best Cookbooks for Pâtés, Terrines, Charcuterie and Other French Cooking.]

Rillettes-making equipment: Rillette pots

Now that you’ve made a nice batch of rillettes, you must put them somewhere and that’s where rillettes pots come in. These can be as fancy or simple as you like. On the fancy spectrum, you can buy small earthenware or stoneware pots. If this is what you’d like to do—and you want to spend a fortune—just go to Etsy and type “rillettes pots” in the search bar. As I write this, a “French earthenware confit pot for rillettes” could be mine for only $110.

Though these earthenware artifacts would be nice, I’m finding just as much earthly happiness using mason jars for my rillettes.

I use three sizes of mason jars to store rillettes. A regular mouth, one-cup mason jar, which is common for jam. This isn’t the best shape for rillettes—taller than it is wide—because you want a jar where the layer of fat over top of the rillettes is about as wide as the rillettes are deep. [I used this size during a mason jar shortage, we gotta make do with what we’ve got!]

The better options are a regular mouth, half-cup mason jar and a wide-mouth, one cup mason jar. With these mason jars, there’s never a pillar of rillettes to work through. It’s harder to pry cold rillettes out of a tall jar with a knife than a shorter, wider jar.

While it’s true that rillettes can last quite some time in the fridge and I’ve seen people store them in one-litre mason jars, I recommend smaller storage containers. This is so you can open one container and know you’ll eat it before it goes bad. Depending on how big and hungry your family is, it might take a while to get through a one-litre jar of rillettes. And maybe they’ll be off or stale by the end.

Or you can put that same one litre quantity of rillettes in four one-cup, wide-mouth mason jars and crack them open as needed. The fat layer over each jar keeps them protected from the air so only one cup of rillettes is getting exposed to air at a time (instead of a bigger batch in a bigger jar).

Plus, you can freeze rillettes and mason jars work well for that. (More on contrary views of freezing rillettes later.)

Rillettes-making equipment: Lids or coverings for the rillettes pots

Well, this might seem like a silly entry on the list of equipment but not all rillette pots come with lids! Of course, when you use mason jars for your rillettes, you’ll use the mason jar lids.

But if you’ve gone fancier and used the stoneware pots—or even those little glass yoghurt containers that are all the rage now—you might not have a lid to go with it.

Don’t fret; fat, tin foil and string will do the trick.

Before you store the rillettes, you always add a layer of melted fat (usually duck fat or lard) on top of the rillettes as this is part of the preservation technique.

Jane Grigson in Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, says, “A depth of half an inch of lard will preserve the rillettes beneath for six months to a year.”

For containers with no lids, here’s what Jane recommends once the lard is hardened, “Cover the lard with a close covering of silver foil, and another piece of it over the top of each pot, tied on with string.”

To get clarity on that instruction, I looked to her instructions for confit. Jane says, “When the contents are quite cold, cover the jars with silver foil, pressing it right down into the lard.”

This way of phrasing it makes the rillettes tin foil instructions more clear to me (and I hope to you).

Rillettes-making equipment: Fridge, freezer or cold room

The final piece of equipment you need is for storage, which can be done in a fridge, freezer or cold room.

As for the fridge, stack your jars of rillettes in there and relax. You may want to label them with the date, so you feel comfortable eating them when you rediscover them at the back of the fridge. [Another reason to use those one-cup, wide-mouth mason jars—they stack nicely.]

Now let’s move to the top (or bottom) of the fridge: the freezer.

When I make a batch of rillettes, I put one or two jars in the fridge and the rest in the freezer. I find the rillettes are just fine after freezing. However, renowned chef David Lebowitz disagrees. In his article and recipe, Pork Rillettes, David says about rillettes, “I don’t recommend freezing them as charcuterie tends to get soggy, if frozen and defrosted.”

Should you take my advice? A nobody home cook who—at the time of writing—has been making rillettes for less than a year? Or David Lebovitz’s advice—a guy who’s been a professional cook and baker for decades? Well, really, David’s advice comes with much more gravitas, so I’d pay attention to that.

However, the best thing to do is throw one small jar in the freezer and see how it seems to you after it’s thawed out. Then you’ll know what works for you. It’s also likely that David has a much more refined palate than me, so deficiencies of frozen-then-thawed rillettes that are obvious to David are indetectable to me.

Okay, now onto the low-tech storage method that doesn’t even require a motor—the cold room.

Technically, rillettes don’t need to be refrigerated. Cooking meat in fat and preserving it in fat is an old-fashioned technique used before the era of Frigidaire.

In his book, The River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says, “With this protective covering [of fat], and in a sealed jar, a confit can keep for months or even a year or two without refrigeration.”

[Confit is whole pieces of meat cooked in fat and stored in fat. Because of these commonalities, I think the confit quote about storage is relevant to the topic of storing rillettes without refrigeration.]

If you’re not going to store your rillettes in the fridge or freezer, you can store it in a specialized cold room or even the chilliest part of your basement. However, if you’re going to do this, I’d definitely put your rillettes in mason jars and lids to protect them from invading creepy-crawlies.

If you’d prefer to have an actual cold storage room in your basement rather than just stacking your rillettes beside the Christmas decorations, you can build one yourself!

Check out Steve Maxwell’s article, Build a Basement Root Cellar, on the Mother Earth News website.

[Sidebar: As a long-time subscriber (10+ years), I can tell you that Mother Earth News is amazing and I highly recommend the magazine for anyone who’s interested in homesteading and wholesome food. If you’ve ever felt that your country was “too divided” across political lines, you’ll love MEN as it’s a place for everyone who’s interested in homesteading and living lightly on the land, where left and right are irrelevant.]    

Rillettes resources

Okay, now that you know you don’t need special equipment to make rillettes, you may want to know more about this amazingly delicious food.

If yes, check out a few of the other articles I’ve written about rillettes:

• Rillettes Glossary: Types of Rillettes in English & French
• How Long Do Rillettes Last? A Long Time So Eat Up!
• How Do You Eat Rillettes? Sandwiches, Nibbles and More!
• Eating Rillettes While Pregnant? Know the Evidence Against
• Rillettes, Rillons, Rillauds & Rillots: What’s the Difference?
• What’s the Difference Between Pâté & Rillettes?
• Noël Rillettes: 10 Reasons to Make Them Every Christmas

It might take you a while to get through that list!

Conclusion

Well, there you have it folks: rillettes are accessible to even the most minimalist home cook. You only need basic equipment to make and store them and you’ll be rewarded with a rich and yummy meat spread that will make your bread, crackers or cucumber slices smile. May your rillettes always be tasty!