O God, sir, here’s a dish I love not. I cannot endure my lady Tongue.
Clearly, Benedick from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is referring to the acerbic wit of Beatrice and not the tender delicacy we ate tonight! We’ve been branching out a bit in recent days, and tonight’s experiment was beef tongue.
Okay, it was a little unnerving to pick up the tongue from its package and see how much it looked like…a tongue! Tastebuds and all. I called Rose, my little scientist, to come examine it with me. She was enthralled!
I cooked it slowly for about two and a half hours with onion, celery and carrot. The skin turned a very unappealing gray, but peeled off easily. Under the skin was meat that separated into strings, rather like a skirt steak that’s been pulled apart with a fork. I took this meat and diced it and put it in a skillet with a cup of water, a half cup of apple cider vinegar and a teaspoon of Rapadura. The liquid boiled off and left the meat so incredibly delicious. Biting into the meat was like biting into a forty-dollar filet. I served it over noodles and the sweet/sour of the meat was a wonderful foil to the bitterness of Brussels sprouts cooked with cream and shallots.
And lest you think I’ve lost my mind, tongue is a fatty part of the meat, and a traditional food. Tongue sandwiches were popular during the Great Depression, when muscle meats were hard to come by and expensive. I paid about $8 for a grassfed beef tongue that weighed in at just less than two pounds.
I had to add some other meat to stretch the meal in the photo for guests, so you’ll see in the photo two distinct types of meat. The tongue meat is the lighter brown with fewer “lines.” By the way, for those of you who cook for the very young, very old or otherwise dentally challenged, tongue meat is very easily chewed.
So, try some tongue, as Psychic Lunch said in a recent Twitter post, “It’s the meat that licks you back!”
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
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February 12, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Anna Migeon
You’re right, tongue is delicious!! It seems very few people (americans at least) are ready to give it a try, though. The grassfed beef tongues we buy are more like $6 a pound, which is pretty steep. I cook mine in the oven with onions and wine. We never invite anyone to share it with us because it’s too little and precious. Also: it would be a pearls-before-swine situation!
February 12, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Sarah
My mom always raves about cow tongue. She says her grandmother used to make it and she loved it until one day my mom saw her preparing it and the sight of the cow tongue laying still on the table forever ruined the dish for her. Maybe someday I’ll give it a try!
February 13, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Michelle @ Find Your Balance
My mom used to make tongue. It grossed me out as a kid but honestly as an adult I’ve never even seen it available. Way to give it a go!
March 6, 2010 at 11:35 am
Anna Salvesen
When I was a kid, I distinctly remember the seeing and poking at the uncooked tongue the neighbors were going to cook. We all thought it was gross. Fast forward to my increased interest in nose-to-tail eating and I’m now experimenting with tongue in my own kitchen. This year I was able to persuade the bison rancher to get the tongue for me with my bulk order.
Tongue served in slices didn’t go over well in my house; despite the tender meat, it still looked a bit too much like tongue, even for my husband, who grew up in England eating sliced tongue sandwiches (because it was a the cheapest deli meat and could be bought in small quantities). It also was almost too tender.
But spicy Mexican lengua has worked out great, a la lengua tacos (my husband and I just make a taco salad instead of filling tortillas). One thing I DON’T DO now, though, is show the tongue to my son and his friends before it is all cooked, spiced, and diced up (easy to do while he’s in school), otherwise I face a wall of biased opposition. I simply say I made lengua tacos and never mention the English name (I have also mixed it with ground meat). Hopefully by the time my son catches on to the translation of lengua, the issue of what body part it is won’t be an issue and he’ll just accept it as good taco meat.
March 7, 2010 at 8:36 am
localnourishment
It’s so funny how kids react to different foods. Some kids will be “grossed out” by tongue, liver, brains and tripe, others think it’s cool. Rose, the child of mine that was fascinated by examining the tongue, is a salt addict. She will salt everything. Researching healthy salt options was an early project of mine. When she sees me pick up anchovies at the store, she is less than thrilled, for fear she’ll taste something fishy. But it’s an ingredient I add to a lot of our food instead of salt. I think she’d be surprised to know just how often I use it! She’s also the one that loves to play with the chicken feet before they go in the stock, and tries to put the vertebrae back together from the chicken necks once the stock is done. Guess I’d better start saving up for medical school!