Does my love of shrimp creole and dirty rice from the thimble-full of cajun blood coursing through my veins? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll tell you this, though: This perfect meld of spices and sausage will have you saying “laissez les bon temps rouler” no matter where you’re from.*
Oh, and here’s the best part: This is my family’s FAVORITE way to eat nutrient-dense liver. They don’t just tolerate it, they ask for it!
Are you ready to get started? Okay then, don’t faint when you see the recipe. The long list of ingredients is mostly made up of spices you already have in your kitchen and it’s fairly simple to make. Try it with baked chicken or blackened salmon with pineapple mango salsa!
* Let the good times roll!
Bayou Dirty Rice
Equipment
- sharp chopping knife
- bowls (2)
- large pot
- strainer
- large spoon
Ingredients
- 2 cups white rice (yes, it’s okay! Or substitute your choice of whole grain rice or sprouted rice – buy some here or make your own)
- 2 cups chicken broth (substitute water if needed)
- 2 cups water
- 3 tbsp coconut oil, lard, or tallow (here to buy pastured lard, how to render lard)
- 1 lb ground pork (unseasoned)
- 1 cup chicken livers (diced into small pieces)
- 3 – 5 slices raw bacon (chopped)
- 1 cup onion (chopped)
- ½ cup celery (chopped)
- ½ cup green bell pepper
- 2 green onion stalks (chopped)
- cajun seasoning (to taste)
- sea salt (to taste)
- 4 tbsp whey, lemon juice, or apple cider vinegar (if using un-soaked rice)
Easy Cajun Seasoning
- 5 tsp paprika
- 3 tsp garlic powder
- 3 tsp onion powder
- 3 tsp ground dried thyme
- 1 tsp ground black pepper
- ⅛ – ¼ tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
- 1 tsp dried basil
- 1 tsp dried oregano
Instructions
The Night Before
- Place chicken livers in a bowl, cover with filtered water and add lemon juice, whey or apple cider vinegar and place in the fridge.
- If using unsprouted rice, place 2 cups of rice and 4 cups of warm filtered water in a bowl and add 4 tablespoons of one of the following: whey, yogurt, kefir, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar. Let the mixture sit at room temperature for at least 7 hours.
Day of Meal
- To prepare the rice, choose from the three options below.
Prepare the Rice:
- Option 1: For white or sprouted rice, simply prepare it according to the instructions on the package with chicken broth instead of water.
- Option 2: For rice that has been soaked overnight, it’s time to change out some of that water for homemade chicken broth. Because the rice has absorbed some of the water it’s not an even exchange to pour the water out and add 4 cups of broth back in. Measure what you pour out and add back in only that amount. I usually do 2 cups. It adds a lot to the depth of flavor in the dish.
- Option 3: OR – to reduce naturally occurring arsenic (a substance which is in lots of foods including vegetables, fruit and chicken), try the pasta-style cooking method.
- Drain liquid from chicken livers and set aside.
- Heat 1 tablespoon of coconut oil/lard/tallow in a large pan over low/medium heat. Add bacon and sautee until slightly crispy.
- Add the remaining oil and onion (but not green onions), celery and bell peppers. Continue to sautee until the onions are beginning to soften.
- Add diced chicken livers and sautee until they begin to brown, then add the pork and spices and continue to sautee until the sausage is cooked through.
- Remove from heat and add in rice, allowing flavors to meld as it cools.
- Garnish with green onions.
Nutrition
Love This Recipe?
Then you’ll also probably like these recipes for Chicken Liver Pate With Bacon and Ultimate Beef & Liver Chili.
Our house loves Dirty Rice too! So much that we skip the ground pork and just do more livers. It’s so good!
Like your blog, but the bar on the left is getting too annoying. Is there any way you can move it further left (like other blogs) so it doesn’t cover the text? Thanks.
Fermenting chicken livers at room temperature? Doesn’t that smell horrible?
Yikes, the directions are supposed to say to put them in the fridge. Editing right now (and thanks for catching that!)
Thanks for the correction. It sounded like a dangerous (and smelly) idea to me!
Indeed!
I can use white rice right? We can’t stand whole and sprouted rice here and have totally made my peace with the white stuff.
Yes, you can totally use white rice! 😀
Heather, this is JUST what I’ve been looking for! A way to use up some fine ground pork that I’ve had in my freezer for months now! And another way to sneak in the liver now and then. 🙂 I love your website and particularly love the recipes for homemade soaps, shampoo bars, lotions, etc. I just made my first batch of body balm with tallow yesterday — love using tallow on my face. I plan to pre-order your beauty recipe book by mid-week next week!
So good! We made this for dinner last night and are actually enjoying the leftovers, instead of letting them sit in the fridge uneaten.
Woohoo! You know it’s good when you’re not even eating it because you feel obligated 🙂
Well this gives me something I can do with the turkey liver I’ll have after tomorrow and the broth I’ll be making the next day! Sounds great!
Ohhhh, turkey broth is the best! Hurry up Thanksgiving!
It turned out so great even though I accidentally dumped in way too much paprika! Thank you for the recipe! We’re going to freeze the leftovers.
Yay! My daughter would have loved the extra paprika 😀
This is so good! I didn’t have chicken liver or sausage so I used ground turkey and it’s still amazing!!
Great recipe! Super yummy. I made the cajun spice mix, and then just added it to taste. I think that’s what you intended. You might want to clarify that in your notes though- so someone doesn’t come along and dump all of those spices in the pan – and then complain it’s too spicy 😛 Unless of course you intended the mix to be used entirely for one batch (I didn’t have cayenne- so I ground up dried peppers I had in the place of that……if I put my whole batch in- you’d be crying 😛 )
Believe it or not I actually do use all the spices except the cayenne (for my kiddos sake, of course!) 🙂
Love the recipe, and I really love Cajun-style dishes too. Maybe it’s having a West African wife! And I’m always up for anything with livers. Chicken livers are so cheap and so under-used.
This was really good. We’re not really liver fans, but this recipe and your liver chili have both been very well received. Thank you! 🙂
Woot! Doing a happy dance over here! Thanks for stopping by to let me know, Tara!
How did this freeze (Erin)? I have about 10lbs of chicken liver I had to thaw out and I want to prepare it all and freeze it. Somehow… I already have a bunch of chili in the freezer so I am looking for anything else.
Could you use cauliflower rice instead of regular rice?
I made this the other night, and while I knew I would at least like it I have to report back how we REALLY felt about it.
When I made this I was getting ready to leave for a meeting- we’ve formed a local health and food discussion group that meets monthly. I barely got this finished and had to leave, so I packed some up in a dish and took it along with me and ate it at the meeting, and never had the chance to answer to my kids’ constant “what is this? what’s in it?” grilling.
I ate it when I got to my meeting and I LOVE LOVE LOVED it. LIke licked the bowl, then ate another bowlful when I got home. Then the next day I asked the kids what they thought of it and they absolutely RAVED. Even my picky 6 year old loved it, and the 4 year old had TWO bowls! Oddly my husband only liked it, and he could totally taste the iron from the liver, but I have a theory about why- I didn’t taste the iron at all until the very end of my second bowl, so perhaps we only get that taste when we’ve had enough? Then it would make perfect sense that my husband tasted it while me and the kids didn’t, because men have a much lower need for iron than women (at least during their childbearing years) and children.
Anyway, I just wanted to come back and encourage anyone with picky children to TRY THIS.
I finally got some chicken livers and have them and the rice soaking now. Going to make this for the first time tomorrow…. can’t wait to try it and see if my little one likes it!
Can you sub in beef liver or will that be too livery tasting? I don’t usually cook liver but know I need to start, so I’m not sure if some liver tastes stronger than others. It seems like beef liver would taste stronger than chicken liver Thanks!
Looks great! I need another way to get organ meats into the kids. I like all the steps for soaking the livers and rice.
On step 5, it says to add the sausage, but the recipe contains ground pork and no sausage. I assume it means add ground pork.
Yes, thank you! I will correct that now 🙂
Judging by the other comments, I should be able to substitute beef liver for the chicken livers, correct? No one answered about it freezing well…does it? Finally purchased our first side of beef (and extras) and it arrives next month. I ordered the heart and liver ground just so I could use it in your chili and now this shows up in my feed! Yeah for me!! Yeah for my family!! 🙂 I’m getting all my recipes in order to use all the wonderful new goodies in my freezer!
You can definitely use beef liver, but it will have a much stronger flavor. You might consider soaking it in some milk overnight to soften the flavor a bit or use a bit less.
May I ask why soak the rice overnight? I’ve rinsed rice before to remove some starch but never left to soak that long.
Excellent liver recipe! 3 adults didn’t notice the liver and the children gobbled it up. Changes I made:
I didn’t soak the liver
I used 3/4 pound ground beef instead of pork (plenty of meat using this amount vs a full pound) and I used 3 slices bacon
Sweet red peppers instead of green bell
It was a bit dry, might have been my rice variety. I added a splash of broth after it was all put together.
I would love to try this recipe one evening,am yet to understand what dirty rice is ,anyone……..
What do you serve Dirty Rice with, or is it a stand alone meal? Thanks.
It’s usually served as a side dish with sausage or blackened chicken/fish. 🙂