We had some friends over this weekend for Vikki’s birthday, and she made a big batch of rumaki for everyone on Sunday morning.  For those who haven’t had the experience, rumaki are basically chicken livers and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon.  There are numerous variations, including some with a soy based sauce on them, but we go for the purist version.

The number one biggest thing is to get good chicken livers.  It’s not easy these days, but check out your local organic or whole foods grocery, or if you have a kosher deli/grocery, that’d probably be a good source too.  I’ve made them with commercial livers from a big grocery store and they can be pretty gross.  Keep in mind that the liver is the part of the body that filters out all the stuff that’s not good for you, and big commercial chicken farms feed chickens lots of stuff that’s not good for them.  Suffice it to say that you can really taste the antibiotics.   Anyway, get organic free range chicken livers if you can find them.  They have a much milder and more pleasant taste.

Cook the livers until they just stop wiggling.  You don’t want to over cook them!  To assemble, wrap up a water chestnut slice with a piece of liver about the same size in about half a strip of (uncooked) bacon and toothpick it together.  Put the finished rolls under the broiler until the bacon is crisp. 

We like to serve ours with hot Chinese-style mustard for dipping.  Well worth the effort.  For the liver-squeamish, we usually make some with green olives instead of the livers, which are also quite tasty, though maybe not quite so sublime.