Liver Pate aka Your Baby’s New Favorite Food

Liver is a traditional food across time and culture due to its powerful nutritional profile, especially regarding important minerals and micronutrients. Liver is particularly high in vitamin A, iron, vitamin B12, folate, zinc and selenium.

In a nutshell, liver is like a perfect multivitamin because of it’s bioavailability, meaning our bodies can easily absorb and put to use liver’s many nutrients.

Parents are often warmed about vitamin A toxicity when offering liver to their infants and young children.  Research shows that liver related vitamin A toxicity occurs in tandem with other forms of vitamin A supplementation from fortified milk and multivitamins.

I suggest offering frequent small servings of liver pate (pa-tay) to infants and toddlers to maximize their willingness to eat strong flavors and to gain the known health benefits of liver. Liver pate is especially well suited for “pre-loaded spoons” to help teach early eaters how to self-feed with spoons. Scoop pate on a spoon and hand it over to your baby so they can eat a deeply nourishing food and develop their feeding skills at the same time.

How to Make Liver Pate:

1. Simmer liver (chicken, beef, lamb, etc.) in water or meat stock until reaching an internal temperature of 160 degrees.  There is no need to trim connective tissues or fatty bits. 

2. Allow liver to cool.

3. Add enough cooking liquid to you high-powered blender to blend the liver into a smooth pate. I love my Vitamix!

4. Blend in added fat.  You really can’t add too much! Pate is a great opportunity for increase your little one’s intake of tallow, coconut oil, lard, duck fat, butter, ghee, etc. Our brains are fatty organs and high quality fats are brain foods!

5. Freeze small servings in a silicon muffin tin and store in a ziploc bag for easy thawing on the stove top or overnight in the fridge

1. 'Mealthy' Food: Meat as a Healthy and Valuable Source of Micronutrients.

Animal : An International Journal of Animal Bioscience. 2007. Nohr D, Biesalski HK.

2. Micronutrients — Assessment, Requirements, Deficiencies, and Interventions.

The New England Journal of Medicine. 2025. Allen LH.

3. Liver Is Widely Eaten by Preschool Children in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa: Implications for Routine Vitamin a Supplementation.

Maternal & Child Nutrition. 2020. van Stuijvenberg ME, Schoeman SE, Nel J, le Roux M, Dhansay MA.