So, in the GIGO article Maggie asked about eating tongue. Great question!! Especially since I’ve never eaten tongue myself …. except the kind you can get as a luncheon meat at some butcher shops, and that seems like cheating.
Found this article easily enough …. which is funny and well written. You know what? Tongue sounds G-R-R-REAT!! I’m gonna buy some today and try it tomorrow.
If there’s enough feedback on “Eating Tongue”, then tomorrow I will consider another cow recipe… “Eating Vagina: It Tastes Like Chicken”.
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With the exception of some Jewish Americans, some Latin Americans—whose food culture may often include it—and some LA supper club hipsters, diners in the United States don’t really seek out beef tongue as a dinner item. I get it: Enjoying the taste of something that some other living, breathing being used to taste things with is conceptually bizarre. The only other instance where we derive pleasure from touching one of our organs to another being’s analogous organ is when we mash our genitals against someone (some thing?) else’s genitals. Or when we mash our tongues next to another’s in embrace. While fucking or kissing seems mostly natural, eating tongue feels anything but.
Perhaps the average American’s hesitance to consume tongue is dictated by the average American restaurateur’s hesitance to put it on the menu: One cannot eat what one is not offered, after all. And because you’re not likely to come across a Jewish deli or a traditional taqueria in, say, my hometown of Amesbury, MA (or any other extremely white and boring town in America), the barrier to beef tongue entry then looms large. Beef tongue is not a part of our national culinary identity, and that lack of infrastructural knowledge—how to clean it, how to butcher it, how to prepare it—means that hundreds of millions of people are consistently missing an opportunity to eat one of the best tasting cuts of beef on the planet.
The case for trying it:
Besides beef tongue being very tasty, it comes with a larger benefit. It’s not a secret that we Americans waste a lot of our food—about 40 percent from farm (uh, factory) to fork to trash can. Milk goes sour, bread gets moldy, lettuce goes limp, we forget we bought that bulk cottage cheese. Shit happens. Using Thanksgiving as an example—how many people remove the bag of giblets from the cavity of our turkey and, instead of frying them up with some red pepper flakes and olive oil, chuck them immediately in the garbage on top of half a dozen discarded egg shells or a pile of dirty baby diapers? My guess is the majority. It’s insanely wasteful, especially considering things like hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys remain edible and delicious even if conceptually strange.
We as a nation need to stop being so afraid of offal, and beef tongue is a good place to start.
Eating tongue isn’t a new phenomenon, but rather a very old one that, because of the onset of the American Factory Food Industrial Complex, we’ve chosen to forget. According to an essay in the April 1999 edition of Science, hominids have been chopping the tongues out of their prey for at least 2.5 million years.
The first indication of hominid tool use in Hata times came during surface collection and excavation of the BOU-VP-12/1 partial skeleton locality…Here, several pieces of mammalian bone showed cut marks and percussion marks made by stone tools. Excavation revealed the left mandible of a medium-sized alcelaphine bovid with three successive, curvilinear striae on its posteromedial surface; these striae are unambiguous cut marks made by a sharp stone flake, presumably during tongue removal.
In laymen’s terms: Our pre-human but still hominid ancestors were cutting tongues out of the heads of ancient cows and eating the fuck out of them. Granted, the tongues our pre-human ancestors were eating were probably tough and not very pleasant because they were probably eating them raw. But the tongues available to us now are tender and creamy and super beefy. (Unless you’re a psychopath/cannibal who’s running around lopping the tongues out of his victim’s heads, in which case I stand corrected.)
Where to get beef tongue:
If you’re lucky enough to live within proximity of a decent Jewish deli, go snag yourself a pickled beef tongue sandwich. And if you’re lucky enough to live within proximity of a decent taqueria, instead of choosing the same old boring chicken taco you get Every Fucking Friday, opt for the lengua. If you live in a place where it’s not readily available, well, you’re going to have to fend for yourself and make your own damned beef tongue. Lucky for you, I love the stuff and have a decent recipe for braised beef tongue tacos. (Note: By this I mean that I’ve pilfered from various traditional Mexican recipes to arrive at something that is sort of, kind of my own.)
Cleaning the tongue:
Beef tongues are disgusting looking. (I’m really selling it, aren’t I?) When fully intact, they’re equipped with a somewhat leathery outer skin (taste buds and all) and some cartilage and sinew at the base. If you’d like, you can remove the cartilage and the sinew—though it’s entirely edible—and the outer skin before cooking. Removing the cartilage and sinew is straightforward: just hack it off. Removing the outer skin is a bit trickier because it involves kneading and massaging the organ till the skin begins to separate from the meat it’s attached to, but the knife skills involved aren’t dissimilar in technique from removing the silver skin from a pork loin. (Maybe you don’t know how to do that, either. This might help.)
You can also remove the skin in the middle of the cooking process, after blanching it for an hour and a half or so. You know how the interior flesh of a sweet potato begins to separate from the outer skin as you bake it? Think that, only with a tongue. Once blanched, the skin should peel away with relative ease. I recommend finding a butcher who will remove the skin for you, however, especially if this is your first foray into at-home tongue eating.
Cooking and eating the tongue:
Along with the tongue, you’ll need the following: Two yellow onions, red onion, cilantro, corn tortillas, queso fresco, one head of garlic, bay leaves (five or so should be fine), a tablespoon of peppercorns, a tablespoon of salt, olive oil, red pepper flakes, and cumin.
Once you’ve got a naked tongue, start making the braising liquid. Fill a stockpot till it’s three-quarters full with water, and add to it your onions (quartered is fine), crushed garlic (the whole dang head), bay leaves, peppercorns, and salt. Sometimes I’ll add a cinnamon stick or two for a little bit of warmth, but it’s not traditional so you can skip this ingredient if you’d like.
Once the braising liquid has reached a rolling boil, add the tongue to the pot, pull the heat back to a simmer, and cover. Cook for another hour and a half or two, or until the tongue is tender to the touch. Unless you blow it (you’ll probably blow it the first time around), you’re about fifteen minutes away from tasty taco treats.
At this point, you’re going to want to remove the tongue from the braising liquid and let it stand for ten minutes, uncovered, on a cutting board. Take this time to prep your tortillas and various taco accoutrement. Chop your cilantro, warm your tortillas in a low oven (150 degrees for no more than a few minutes, otherwise they’ll get brittle and dry, which is no bueno), dice your red onion, and bloom your red pepper flakes and cumin (a pinch of each, give or take, is fine) in olive oil in a skillet over a medium flame.
After you’ve allowed the tongue to rest, it’s time to slice it up. You can slice the tongue however you like, but rough cubes are what I go for. The size of an individual brick of PEZ should do. Once sliced, add the tongue bricks to the skillet and toss with the oil and spices. The tongue only needs a minute or two on the stovetop before it’s ready to serve.
You’re now mere moments away from some luscious tongue to tongue contact. Add a scoop of the tongue to a warm tortilla, top it with red onion, queso fresco and cilantro, and then devour. Don’t be afraid of the guts and organs, folks. They’re often the best part.
Terrence lives in Boston, where he works as an editor for America’s Test Kitchen. He’s co-founder of Bender Magazine, and has also written for Vice Sports, Tasting Table, and Serious Eats. Sometimes he tweets poorly @TerrenceDoyle.
https://adequateman.deadspin.com/how-to-enjoy-some-delicious-beef-tongue-1770277633
My dad used to eat pickled lamb tongue with saltines and ketchup. I found it horrifying as a kid, just made me think of eating my own tongue.
I do enjoy beef liver sauteed with bacon. Always have since I was 5 years old and the very weird kid who liked very rare steak and calamari.
The supermarket in the nearby town carries all manner of animal parts from pigs, chickens and cows. Whole hog heads neatly wrapped in plastice, tripas, tongue, brains, you-name-it and it is in the meat case and that meat case is huge…..I’ve eaten tongue, wasn’t real excited by it, ditto scrambled brains and eggs and kidneys and so on, Mom was German from the old country, so offal was a common item on the menu. To this day I cannot stomach the thought of liver, no matter how many tubs of butter it gets cooked in.
My Dad wrapped chicken livers with individual strips of
bacon and threw them under the broiler to get us to eat
liver.
They were DELICIOUS (’cause you don’t even notice the
liver, just the bacon).
I still fix ’em that way today.
Pork liver is also excellent that way. Sweeter-tasting than chicken liver. You need the extra fat, because they can be dry otherwise.
Lengua? I used to get it at the local burrito shop, but they discontinued it. It’s just a muscle. It’s not like you’re eating bovine dick. Which reminds me of the funniest joke in the world – the moose cock joke. http://gwally.com/humor/000501.php
My mother cooked cow’s tongue frequently when I was a kid. It was inexpensive in those days, and royalty we were not. She boiled it, and it was very tender. Nothing better than finding a tongue and mustard samich in your lunchbox the next day. Oh baby!
As a beaner, I don’t recall my mamacita making this delicacy. She also refused to add pig’s feet to the menudo, it was always straight up honeycomb tripe and a can of hominy. Chihuahuans eat this boiled conconction sans sauce but the rest of the world does what my mamacita does, she adds a sauce of boiled red chile, chile pasilla, garlic and other spices. What’s menudo if it isn’t red hot? It’s Chihuahua style.
The sexy mulatta says nobody eats menudo with bolillos, she insists on corn tortillas. Hmm, all of El Paso eats it with whole or cut up bolillos. Menudo is the breakfast of champions. It is also a great pick me up after a New Years Eve Tigres Del Norte concert at a restaurant in Tucson.
Bolillos I can get, but do you have a line on a “bolito”?
bolito is a drunk.
I thought that was a borachito.
Bolito is a Salvy term, diminutive of bolo – drunk. A fart in Mexican spanish is ‘pedo’. To be drunk is also called ‘andar pedo’. In Central America, a fart is called a ‘bola’. A drunk is said to be ‘bolo’.
Good Lord. I hear an accordion in that tune, and you talked about tripe.
As a lad, working in a Polish catering hall and restaurant, they’d sometimes offer tripe soup, besides other ethnic comfort foods.
At weddings, the accordion was prominent when the band played polkas.
Who would’ve thought, that Polacks & Beaners would both be tappin’ their toes to similar music, and perhaps even whirling around their chubby wives in a tussel out on the dance floor… together.
Could happen.
Like if a fine Seniorita fell for gangly Stosh, or Walt.
Or, if a hard working Pedro found love with a Stella Kowalski.
Nah. That’s crazy. Loco.
Accordion? How’s about this little ditty played on a $9,000. accordian?
Sexy accordion and Bandura
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Mexicans
Yeah, well, you’re royalty in my book, bud.
At the very least, King of the gifs.
Me? I’d be the jester.
On the sidelines.
In a cast
On Broadway?
May I be frank?
No, Comenstrual. (minstrel?)
I’ll give you props for bein’ witty, but I shouldn’t even have to say that my word play was a hat tip to Mr. McLean.
But you knew that, music man.
And don’t take offense, to my play on your moniker.
I don’t want to get a rise out of what I consider another bud.
R eyes …focused on witty fun.
But, if so inclined, hey.
There were three shitties mentioned as comparables, on the heels of the Baltimore thread.
You have knowledge and a good memory, and I can roll with just about any jab at my ties and familiarity with a prominent shithole.
I noticed no mention of any comparables in SoCal, but that’s ok.
I fired up an Ashton or two over the weekend, and you came to mind.
Common ground, amigo.
Una pregunta…
What’s the command form of:
Smile! …from sonreir?
-Saludos!
(usual sign off)
sonríe. Informal second-person singular (tú) affirmative imperative form of sonreír. Formal second-person singular (usted) present indicative form of sonreír.
+10! Myyyyyy buddy.
You know verb conjugation.
Command. Imperative.
It’s important, & good knowledge to impart. Gracias.
Thanks, ~L, my fellow Brolelitarian.
You are fixing to see a photo of me and my beef tongue.
Also, the beef heart, which is on the left.
My husband just ignores me when I do shit like STOP weeding the garden to take a picture of my beef tongue and heart.
I just may go ahead and thaw the tongue out and give some of your luscious tongue tempting ideas a lick.
By the way… the sad thing about the heart is that one of the best Bill Cosby routines we loved when we were younger was Chicken Heart. When we unpacked this beef from the butcher, we couldn’t help but laugh. Then, we got sad, realizing one can hardly talk about Cosby without thinking WTF?
If you get good at the birria and beef tongue, we might just make it to your place for the next TBP roundup. Might like to meet Hondo (diminutive of Alejandro).
Maggie- We even have the same front door on our log home as you. Our porch floor is so weathered, what treatment is on yours?
I left you beef tongue info in the other thread. I never eat the stuff but don’t poo-poo it in the least. TRY IT, you might like it.
I’ll invite you for the tongue feast!
Notice the Go Away sign under the patriotic doggie?
Gastineau recommended/included TWP HoneyTone stain/sealant and it has really lasted, hasn’t it?
I cubed several and boiled them for a huge stew back in the 80’s. A man in our church who coocked for the local soup kitchen needed bypass surgery so I attempted to cover for him for 2 weeks. There was no other meat in the freezer and I didn’t recognize it till it thawed. A bum helping out said it was tough so I took his word and boiled it. Maybe I didn’t need to but I didn’t have a clue so I went with the advice. It really wasn’t bad at all. It was hard to look at when thawed on the counter. I was shocked to realize those round bump are just larger versions of what we have on our tongue. I’ve had many a milk cow wrap their tongue around my hand as a kid to lick off the molasses we put on hay that had been rained on twice but never realized they looked like that way down in the back.
It is a daunting piece of meat to consider for cooking, the tongue. I pulled two Tbones and put the tongue back into deep freeze storage for when you visit, Flea.
I have smoked beef tongues before with excellent results. Camp house venison heart and liver, yum yum. I was yakking with a kidney surgeon not too long ago who told me when he was in undergrad, the science department had an unlimited supply of beef hearts for study. He bragged how he was so poor he survived by taking them home and eating them.
First time I ever ate tongue was 2 years ago – from a blue wildebeest bull. It was delicious.
Wait….. No Giraffe tongue?????
How to get thumbs up on TBP…
Nose to tail, somebody somewhere is eating every part of the animal, sometimes by necessity mostly by choice. From Pferde Leber Kase (Horse liver pate in Austria) to Horse everything in Kazakstan and let’s not get me started on the aquatic morsels consumed (mostly alive) in Asia. Frogs are awesome, chicken feet in China….suck and Jellyfish are indistinguishable to rubber bands in my book. The tongue is middle of the road stuff……Just wait till some mountain tribesman hands you a semi-cooked sheep’s eyeball…..harder and crunchier than you would think!
Better some fresh well-prepared tongue than some over-processed chemical infused “un-food”…..
Chicken feet stewed in bone broth for 24 hours is awesome shit. Collagen supreme. I got mine from Hardscrabble. Helps fight those wrinkles from soaking in the big vitamin D disk in the sky.
Ok you can have my share!
Just a Bourgeois white guy here, I guess. I’m not eating the tongue, the nuts, the tail, none of that shit. I’m not a picky eater, but I guess I’m sort of a squeamish eater. I don’t like Thai food because I don’t like fish served with the eyeballs looking at me.
you limp noodle….
Fifty years ago I made a promise to myself that I was not going to eat anything an animal thought with, ate with, or fucked with. Have been true to my word to this day and still kickin’.
Is it moosecock?
How do you cook that, Iska?
I have two beef tongues and a pig tongue in the freezer. Haven’t had the balls to cook them up yet, but will. I remember a book I read about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Whenever they shot a buffalo, the first thing and favorite thing they would eat was the tongue. Gotta be something to it.
Same author of the book Band Of Brothers.
Spielberg & Hanks made sure the 6 million narrative was featured, besides the dustup between Bill Guarnier and Joe Liebgott, in the HBO series. Not so much, by the book’s author.
Ambrose did make many references to the almost universal hatred of Herbert Sobel, in the book.
Well, I guess I didn’t have it so bad. We were not well off for sure but we never ate an organ or tongue, a neck or feet. Ewww.
Capt. Beefheart
One of the greatest but least accessible albums in human history!
Fascinating.
I personally have removed hundreds of tongues from beef heads. Perfectly wholesome food though not high on my priority list.
Pickled beef tongue is delicious. Been eating it my whole life. Gotta boil it for about 3 hours tho – let it cool a bit then peel off the hard skin. Bit of homemade mustard sauce (Dijon or German) on top. yum.
Our local German delicatessen has tons of other stuff too: Blut wurst with tongue, aspic (curried and normal), leber wurst, Pfeffersäckchen, rabbit, duck, pork trotters…
At our super markets we can get beef liver, chicken liver peri peri (addictive), kidneys, chicken feet, chicken necks, liver, kidneys etc.
When I travel, I make a point of trying other foods eg. Was in Sicily last month, Syracuse. The Italians take their food VERY seriously. So, salamis in a dozen different varieties, all out of this world. Mortadella – mind blowingly delicious. Fresh anchovies (acciughe or alici), cured or fresh – yum. Prosciutto…
I tried Donkey meat, it was on the menu – in burger form – venison-like, a little funky but edible.
Pasta with/in squid ink – a little like caviar – mildly salty.
A ‘burger’ like no other: the bun was picture perfect, but yellow, they had added turmeric to the dough (I had initially thought it was curry powder), the meat was chopped up salami made on the premises, and some type of relish, eggplant with olive oil and spices I think… the whole combo was superbly, mind blowingly awesome…
Larks’ Tongues In Aspic
Makes an excellent roast. But I can’t always get it to come out right, so I gave up. When it works you can just easily peel the skin off. When it doesn’t the whole thing is just kind of a mess and gross.
Great tasting meat when it works, though.
I just want to say I am thankful for whatever and whomever has granted me this respite from doing penance.
And not the Pirate kind.