Liver Dumpling Soup

“Liver dumplings?” you say. “Really?”

Unless you’re saying, “Leberknoedel! Sehr gut!”

But yes, really. These dumplings are three-year-old approved.

With a food processor this recipe is quite simple to make, and is a great way to make a meal with our healthy, pasture-raised pork liver. This is for when you want a mild, “hm, yes, I can taste the liver in this” and not the strong, “Wow! That’s a lot of liver flavor!” that you would get from something like a “paatay”. (Our website software apparently doesn’t know how to print an e with an accent.)

You will need

A large cooking pot, a couple large bowls, a knife, and a food processor.

Liver (Get GOOD liver. Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig! You could use calves liver or beef liver as well.)

Bacon (Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig!)

A couple eggs (Ditto, except from a chicken. Pigs don’t lay eggs. That would make breakfast too easy.)

Plain wheat bread (could be white, whole wheat, or sourdough)

Milk or cream

Bread crumbs or just some old extra bread

Fresh parsley or possibly some other fresh herb you like

Marjoram (dried or fresh)

Onion

Salt and pepper

Seasoned beef broth. (You could of course use pork broth, but in fact using beef broth provides a nice flavor contrast, and while the liver flavor really isn’t that strong, chicken broth probably isn’t going to be enough to stand up to it.)

Here’s what to do

Take about as much bread as you have liver (by size, not weight) and cut or tear it up into pieces. Soak these in milk or cream. Use your hands and squish the bread and milk to ensure the bread is soaked. Use enough milk or cream that the bread gets very full of milk, but not so much that the bread can’t soak it all up. Do this first so you can set it aside and let the milk soak into the bread while you prepare everything else.

If you get liver from us it ought to be pretty well cleaned already. Cut it up into pieces about 2 inches in size. You may find some tough parts, cut those out and give those to the dog.

Cut the bacon into about 2-inch pieces. Use enough bacon that you’ll be able to taste it, but you don’t need a 1:1 ratio. These are liver dumplings with some bacon added for the flavor, not bacon-and-liver dumplings. This would be a great way to use those “bacon ends and pieces” you got a good deal on.

Put the liver pieces and bacon pieces in your food processor and make pink paste.

Finely dice an onion and chop some parsley. Again, you want enough onion and parsley that you can taste them, but you don’t want so much that these turn into onion dumplings.

Like this!

In a large bowl, using your hands, mix the milk-soaked bread, liver-and-bacon paste, onion, parsley, marjoram (a pinch or a couple teaspoons, depending on whether your liver is measured in ounces or pounds), salt and pepper, and two eggs. The mixture will be very wet. Add bread crumbs or crumbled old bread until the mixture sticks together. You should be able to pick up a spoonful and turn the spoon over without it falling off.

None of this takes very long, but you could do this part in advance and just store the mixture in the fridge until you’re ready to cook.

Cooking takes about 30 minutes

In a large pot bring the broth to a boil. After you begin adding the dumplings, turn down the heat. The dumplings should be simmered, not boiled. (The cold dumplings will cool down the broth. That’s why you want to bring the broth up to a boil first and then turn down the heat to cook. If you add the dumplings first and then try to heat it up, it will take you until forget-it-we’ll-just-have-pizza time to get the whole thing up to temperature.)

Here’s what they look like while cooking

Using a soup spoon or other large table-spoon-ish-sized instrument, make “quenelles” of the dumpling mixture. (“Quenelle” is apparently a fancy French word for “a spoonful”. We don’t know. All the French people we know talk like normal people.) Slide them off the spoon into the simmering broth. You might need to use another spoon (or your finger) to help get the sticky dumpling mixture off the spoon. You can fill the pot with dumplings, just make sure that the dumplings are in the broth and not piled on top of it. After they cook for a bit they will float to the top; that’s fine.

Let the dumplings simmer in the broth for 25 minutes. As long as it is simmering and not boiling, you can cook them longer if you’re not ready to eat yet. We kept them on for 50 minutes and second helpings tasted as good as the first. If you are going to cook them longer, put a lid on the pot so your broth doesn’t evaporate away.

Serve the dumplings in the broth and with some more rough-chopped parsley. This isn’t a low-carb meal given all the bread and bread crumbs in it, so some nice crusty bread is a nice addition to help soak up the broth.

If the soup smells strongly of liver, do not despair! (We’re not saying it smells “bad”, just strong.) In fact it will likely taste relatively mild. It seems something about the liver flavor compounds aerosolizes quite well, but the smell isn’t an indication of the taste.

Seriously this is really good. Bitte!