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The best part of the entire cow is the part that white people almost never eat go figure. This is my secret #1 process for beef tongue, all of it obvious, but the tongue is such a premium piece of food that getting much more complicated than this often does more harm than good -- though of course it will still be delicious if you use beef tongue. Tongue has a good beefy flavor and the same kind of richness you get from ribeye without the visible marbling. Being a tongue the texture is also amazing. It's super tender and even though I put it through three stages of cooking (probably only two but I don't care three sounds better) it maintains this texture very well. People underestimate how important texture is especially in beef with many favored cuts of beef (filet is notorious for this) actually having poor to mediocre flavor but fetching premium prices for the texture alone. BTW if you post and say "but I have a beard and I eat tacos" you're a fago. Anyway, here are two beef tongues, one leek, one onion and half a bag of baby carrots. And a couple bay leaves. There is one hot pan in the middle. A beef tongue weighs about five pounds, you need a giant roasting pan to do two at once, luckily I have one, if you don't gently caress you.  Now, the issue with the tongue is that the skin will get discarded at some point. There's good flavor in the skin and this process is all about maximizing flavor. So how do we get flavor from the skin instead of just wasting it? By browning it real hard in the pan -- about five minutes a side on fairly high heat. How much heat depends on what cookware you use -- you have to get a feel for how long you can keep the tongue in there on each side before you risk burning the fond that sticks to the pan.  Once you get to about five minutes a side your nose will pick up the faintest whiff of burnt beef if you're a newb. That's fine so long as you stop it there, it won't be detectable. Once you get good you can turn the corner just before this happens. Anyway you remove the beef tongue and lift the fond off the bottom of the pan with 3/4 or so of a cup of water, and dump in your veg, which I will call the poix. Scrape up anything that's stuck. Add some oil. Crank up the heat. Don't stir very much. When the water is starting to get scarce you will start getting color on your veg, turn down your heat to medium or medium high and every four minutes or so move the veggies around so they are on a new side. You want to try to get browning on the leeks (easy), onions (not hard) and carrots (the last to turn, cutting them into thin disks and letting the disks air dry a while first helps, but I forgot to prep the carrots so I just dumped in half a bag who cares). The fond that you lifted will stick to them making you think you've done this sooner than you have but keep at it. If you smell a whiff of burnt beef again you can either relift the fond or just decide to go on with what your'e doing saying you've colored the veggies enough.  This is about six cups of water, maybe more, and the beef tongues reintroduced. Note how brown the liquid is. This is your reward for doing all the browning. Note that you can also just dump all of the above into water raw without the browning and still come out on this okay, but this is effort cooking in this post so deal with it. Detour time: The third cooking step will start with a garlic and oil rub. To go with this I also cooked a garlic and oil and parmesan orzo pasta (which Italians think is a thing but it's just obvious cooking so I won't go into it). Anyway I needed about a head and a half of peeled garlic. Let me show you how to do this in thirty seconds.  Smash your garlic cloves apart with your hand and drop them into a big bowl. Get another identical bowl and invert it so you have a big ball with fearful garlics in the bottom. Sing happy birthday to yourself once or twice while shaking the garlic up and down in the bowl cavity real loving hard. It will make a tremendous racket. When you open the bowls all the papers will be separate from all the garlics and you will be able to just lift them out. You can easily peel like three heads of garlic at once in way less than a minute this way.  Now, some this garlic I sliced cutely for the pasta. The rest will get pureed for the beef tongue. I have removed the little butt ends but I don't think it's necessary. How do you puree a head of garlic in another twenty seconds?  You put plastic wrap over it and bash it with a rubber mallet. These mallets cost two bucks at Walmart. You can use a tenderizer or whatever else too, who cares.  Criss cross with a knife just a little and you're done. Note that doing the garlic this way releases way more of the internal oils and you get way more garlic flavor out of your garlic than any prep you could do with a knife or processor or even press, while maintaining visible rustic garlic pieces. It's not only the fastest way to do up garlic but probably the most economical.  Add salt, pepper, smoked paprika, oil, let it sit while the beef tongues cook. The beef tongues simmer for about an hour and a half, then you flip them over, then another hour and a half.  You need to let them cool for a while to be able to skin them efficiently, much of which is best done with fingertips. So take them out.  Strain out the poix. You could also pick out the bay leaves and puree it or do a number of other things with it but I just threw it out. I'm only interested in the broth underneath really. This broth goes back into the big pan and you reduce it until it sticks pretty heavily to a spoon. This will turn the 6-8 cups of fluid you have into around a cup usually, less or more depending on how you feel. Taste it when you think it's close -- you want a crazy strong flavor but not so strong it's repellent. You will of course have skimmed off the small amount of grey foam that formed while the tongue simmered and will also skim off the fat while the sauce reduces. You can also mount the sauce with butter (this means you put in an okay sized hunk of cold butter and spin it into the sauce) at the end if you want but that's optional. This all goes on in the background while you do the other stuff.  The top surfaces of the tongue skin is best removed by just pulling it off in strips with your finger tips. It comes off very easily once you get a tab pulled up to grab ahold of.  The skin on the sides is attached to fattier meat and is hard to hold because it is greasier and it's much flimsier meaning it doesn't come off in nice sections and it's easier to lift it with one hand and detach it by lightly sawing with a carving or paring knife at the attachment point. You lose a little meat this way but you save a lot of time.  Now you want to cut the tongue into steaks just under an inch thick and then score the steaks. Make a grid, flip it over, then make the same grid but offset. You are trying to increase the surface area of the tongue as much as possible. We are going to finish them on a smoky grill and are trying to get as much surface area as we can for smoke to adhere to. We are also making more fine edges to crisp on the heat of the barbecue.  Put about a half spoonful of the garlic/salt/pepper/smoked paprika/oil mix onto each tongue steak and work it into the cracks so the pieces of garlic hold the cracks open. Flip and repeat. You're close to the final stages now. In the background your sauce is probably reduced and your pasta water boiling. Start doing the pasta now and it will be done right about when the tongue is.  We really want color on the meat and smoke. So add plenty of wood chips and put the tongue on when the coals are almost a little too hot. Peek under to see when you get the brave bold color you want. Then flip. Then remove. The tongue is already cooked when we stared so we are flavoring here, not really cooking. Do it by eye. Keep the lid on as much as you're able in order to keep the smoke next to the tongue as much as possible.  What else is left but to plate and sauce?  Huge beef punch, great soft texture, intense flavor from the sauce, barbecue up to 11. I will put this beef tongue against any other dish in the world. raton fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jun 17, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 02:43
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Note that sweetbreads are the second best part of the cow and if you disagree with my tongue/breads ranking you are not allowed to post in this thread. Also note I used grapeseed oil for browning but it's not in the first picture. Olive oil is not good for browning. You can use regular cheap oil or coconut or bacon fat or loving whatever I don't care. I like grape because it's got a crazy high smoke point. raton fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 02:43
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but I have a beard and I eat tacos
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Jun 1, 2016 02:51
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You may also not barbecue the beef tongue. You may also not boil it and only barbecue it. Beef tongue is very forgiving. Old Russian ladies will just boil them with an onion or two, no browning needed, peel, chill, slice thin, and serve with vinaigrette. They will dump the broth down the drain. Ain't that some 1950s poo poo? Anyway beef tongue is good material.
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Jun 1, 2016 03:03
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First time I tried beeftongue it was because Sysco sent my former restaurant a box full of them by accident and, although the rep reimbursed us for it, never asked us to return it. We pickled them and then broke off the membrane before poaching some of them in a heavily modified court bouillon and pulling some of them apart for tacos iirc. The rest I cured for our charcuterie plate. That was a long time ago. If I can find the pics, I'll post them. Definitely loved the flavour and totally agree with you, OP. Awesome post.
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Jun 1, 2016 20:16
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how much meat is left after cutting everything away? i thought they required a lot longer cooking. might have to hunt some down because its not used at all in the UK as far as i can tell
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Jun 1, 2016 20:47
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Sheep-Goats posted:Old Russian ladies will just boil them with an onion or two, no browning needed, peel, chill, slice thin, and serve with vinaigrette. They will dump the broth down the drain. Ain't that some 1950s poo poo? My mom always did and threw in chopped olives and capers and a buttload of parsley; it comes out really good.
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Jun 1, 2016 21:02
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Jose posted:how much meat is left after cutting everything away? i thought they required a lot longer cooking. might have to hunt some down because its not used at all in the UK as far as i can tell Almost all of it. That's one of the good things about tongue. Most beef you pay for a pound and then eat half a pound. With tongue you pay for five and eat like 4.5. If you're in a tongue sparse zone try asking a butcher to order you in a tongue. raton fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Jun 2, 2016 |
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Jun 2, 2016 02:10
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Serviette posted:First time I tried beeftongue it was because Sysco sent my former restaurant a box full of them by accident and, although the rep reimbursed us for it, never asked us to return it. We pickled them and then broke off the membrane before poaching some of them in a heavily modified court bouillon and pulling some of them apart for tacos iirc. That's a lot of tongue work
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Jun 2, 2016 02:13
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There's a place in my hometown in West Texas that serves a wonderful lengua dish. It seems to be stewed with tomatoes, cilantro, jalapenos, onions, and an absurd amount of garlic. This dish is solely responsible to turning me on to offal. I get it every chance I get.
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Jun 2, 2016 04:45
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nazutul posted:There's a place in my hometown in West Texas that serves a wonderful lengua dish. It seems to be stewed with tomatoes, cilantro, jalapenos, onions, and an absurd amount of garlic. This dish is solely responsible to turning me on to offal. I get it every chance I get. I used to get tongue at a Colombian place in NYC (it has a few locations now, Pollos a la Brasa Mario) that came in a orange/tomato/onion sauce that was, I think, pretty simply stewed in it. They only took off the top skin and then sliced the tongue long ways, leaving the side skin on for the customer to remove.
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Jun 2, 2016 08:09
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Jose posted:how much meat is left after cutting everything away? i thought they required a lot longer cooking. might have to hunt some down because its not used at all in the UK as far as i can tell You've never had a tongue sandwich? Tongue is pretty common, especially in deli departments, but for a whole one you may need to go to a butchers.
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Jun 3, 2016 18:56
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Tongue is the best. Back when I was a lil kid in the motherland, I'd often have a thick slice of tongue fried alongside a huge boletus mushroom and some horseradish for dinner. It owned! Nowadays my family makes it for special occasions, usually during xmas, and it's usually my fave dish. I'll have to try this way of making it. 420 eat tongue errday!
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Jun 3, 2016 19:40
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I super duper want to try beef tongue but around here I can only find them for like 18 bucks, and I'm the only one who would be eating it. Anyone near North Florida want to have a tongue party?
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Jun 3, 2016 19:41
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Suspect Bucket posted:I super duper want to try beef tongue but around here I can only find them for like 18 bucks, and I'm the only one who would be eating it. Anyone near North Florida want to have a tongue party? That's not bad they weigh like 5 lbs
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Jun 3, 2016 19:42
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If you don't mind can you post your sweetbread recipe? Or is it as simple as all the recipes I turn up on google say?
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Jun 3, 2016 22:20
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RoboCicero posted:If you don't mind can you post your sweetbread recipe? Or is it as simple as all the recipes I turn up on google say? I don't have one I just pan fry or grill them. Gotta take out some of them membranes and wash them too.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:46
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Good thread, I might have to try this.
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Jun 4, 2016 14:23
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1: What's the texture really like? 2: After I carve it up into steaks, can I freeze it or refrigerate them? One tongue is more than I will eat at once and I know my wife won't eat it.
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Jun 4, 2016 19:19
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QuarkMartial posted:1: What's the texture really like? 1) In general: the softest possible beef, almost like a dense cake Also 1) In this prep: all the cooking toughens it a bit and it comes out kinda like a grilled chicken thigh. There are some crisp edges from the barbecue so you just a tiny bit of, like, crunch too. 2) Sure. When I make it I eat it over the next week or so just by keeping it in the fridge. It's not like being frozen and then microwaved is going to be a disaster for a piece of meat that was already browned for 20 minutes, boiled for two hours and then barbecued. Tell your wife that Sheep Goats will disrespect her on the internet if she does not try it. raton fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 22:32
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Reminder: during the days of the great buffalo slaughters in the American West the only parts of the buffalo the white people didn't waste were the pelt and the tongue
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Jun 5, 2016 22:39
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Sheep-Goats posted:Reminder: during the days of the great buffalo slaughters in the American West the only parts of the buffalo the white people didn't waste were the pelt and the tongue Man, I'm still waiting for someone with the ballz to tell white people to suck the tongue.
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Jun 6, 2016 05:20
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