Now For Something Completely Different

            So I said in the tag line for this blog that there was going to be some experiments so here is the first. I am not sure what put the thought in my head but it appeared there. I wanted to try and cook some cuts of meat that are a little unusual and different than my very sheltered palate is used to. So my first foray into the world of off cuts starts at the head, I am talking about beef tongue. I have heard that this is a staple of delis in the eastern part of North America yet it something that is not in abundance where I live. I started perusing my cook books to see if I could find a recipe and between the magic of Thomas Keller and the genius of Mario Batali I managed to cook a pretty tasty tongue. I liked it anyway. So here we go, beef tongue, feel free to make all the faces you want.

            Tongue is just about the ugliest cut of meat that I have ever worked with in both looks and feel. The first thing you need to prepare for is the size of the thing. It is a little frightening to look at a beef tongue and realize that thing weighs 3 pounds. The next thing you need to prepare for is that it looks like what it is called. You look down at your cutting board and you see a big ass tongue. You can tell yourself that it is just like cooking a roast but roasts come to you all neatly cut and tied from your butcher and look familiar. There is very little about the look of tongue that smacks with familiarity. Finally the feel of the thing is weird. The texture of the skin is somewhere between shoe leather and sandpaper and the thing is bumpy, if you ever wonder if cows have taste buds, they do. All of this stuff is simply different than what I am used to cooking and does not make the end result any less tasty. So give tongue a try if you are feeling adventurous. Now on to how I cooked it.

            The first thing you need to know is that cooking tongue is a little on the time consuming side of things. You can’t just pick up some tongue, fire it into a pan, and have beautifully cooked tongue in twenty minutes. It is a bit more labor intensive than that. The process basically consists of three parts: soaking, boiling and braising. The soaking part is just that; submerge the tongue in water for 12 hours changing the water about every 2 hours. You do have to trim the thing down and remove any excess fat and glandular hangers on before you soak it. The boiling part is again just that; boil the sucker for 25-30 minutes and then dump it into freezing cold water. Now you get to peel the thing. I will admit that this is a little bit of a pain in the ass. I am sure there are easier ways of getting the skin off but I didn’t find it. The final step is the braise; I tried to go a simple as I could because I wanted to get as much beef flavor as I could. I went with red wine a little garlic and some onions, and that is it. I braised it for about 2 ½ hours and let it rest for about half an hour. I sliced it thin and served it with cauliflower puree and some lightly steamed baby carrots. It was delicious.

            If you, lovely readers would like the recipes that I used in this experiment feel free to email me and I would be happy to hit you back with the step by step. Now on to the next experiment and some stuff I am a little bit more comfortable with. It was fun tongue, see you soon.