Liver quality

[Kent Wang]

I recently bought some chicken livers from the farmers market and it tasted great: sweet, hardly any bitterness. Today I bought chicken livers from Chinatown and they were wretched: bitter, with an array of unusual off-flavors. I threw them away.

Do livers vary so much in quality? It would make sense to me considering the function of the liver in the body.

Where do most restaurants get the livers for chicken liver mousse or pate? Do they have to seek out special chicken? I've certainly never had a chicken liver dish at a restaurant that tasted like the Chinatown livers.

[Peter the eater]

Don't know what's up with your Chinatown chicken livers, maybe they were old and/or poorly stored. The Chinatown I once lived near in Toronto had some great items and others that were total rubbish.

If I could only buy one organic grocery item, it would be liver for the reasons you alluded to -- it's the major detox organ of the animal's body.

[Pam R]

Did you buy raw or cooked livers? If you're prepping raw chicken livers, you have to make sure there isn't any gallbladder left attached to them. Gallbladder will give a bitter or off taste to the liver.

[Kent Wang]

Raw.

The livers were a huge soggy mess and would have been a real pain to remove any thing like a gallbladder.

[Pam R]

Er. Huge soggy mess doesn't sound good. On a whole liver, it's easy to see anything that shouldn't be there. We go through a lot of chicken livers (for chopped liver) and they rarely have any gallbladder left on them, but every once in a while they do. If you don't remove it, it can ruin the whole dish.