It’s been almost two weeks since my wife Christine and I went full-fledged low-carb Paleo with our nutrition and I can’t say anything bad about the experience so far. Surely I’d have some cravings. Nope. But what about finding good quality food to consume? No problem between my local farm, farmer’s market and the Internet. In fact, take a gander at all the delicious and nutritious food we are consuming now!
I’ve been cooking a couple of times daily since this started and have rekindled my long lost love for experimenting with food again. It’s been a revival of my low-carb lifestyle of sorts that has been sorely needed for a long while. Christine is certainly loving all the fresh, homemade Paleo food (and doesn’t mind cleaning up the dirty dishes I pile up in the sink) and is thrilled to be walking this journey at this time.
However, if you watched that video of me showing you what is in my refrigerator, then you may have noticed a rather strange food I mentioned was lurking in there. Did you catch it? No? WATCH IT AGAIN HERE–FAST FORWARD TO THE 1:39 MARK.
Yes, you heard me right. I’ve got beef tongue. As in the tongue from a cow. It’s not just any cow, mind you–grass-fed all the way baby! But I know the first thought so many of you are having right now if you’ve never consumed tongue in your diet is “EWWWWW, gross!” Believe me, I got a lot of that from my Facebook friends. Take a look at what some of them had to say about this:
“I cannot get over that’s it is a tongue. I’m sure it’s delicious, but I have a serious mental block that prevents me from eating tongue. lol”
“Can’t get over the mental hurdle. I’d feel like I was french kissing my food
”
“I just can’t get by the thought and would gag….lol”
“I’m for organ meats per se, I’ll eat pate like a princess, but I’m not going to look at a huge beef tongue.”
“I think I am going to pass on that dinner invitation. I remember being served tongue in grade school. I did not get to go to recess on those days cause I did not clean my plate.”
Funny? Yes! In fact, I probably would have been cracking the same kind of jokes not that long ago if I had read about one of my friends on Facebook talking about cooking up a tongue…that is, until I started being more adventurous with my food thanks to the influence over the years of The Weston A. Price Foundation and my newfound Paleo diet. The fact is the tongue of a cow is nothing more than another muscle in the body. And we already eat much of the other muscle on a cow–so why not the tongue?
Coincidentally, as I was beginning to become gung ho about trying beef tongue for the first time in nearly four decades of life, I heard from my friend Jennifer McLagan, a James Beard Award-winning author of Fat: An Appreciation Of A Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes which was named the “Cookbook of the Year” by the Beard Foundation in 2009 (I even had the privilege of interviewing Jennifer on my podcast in December 2008 about this awesome book). Well, she’s back in 2011 with a brand spankin’ new book that deals with–what else?–all the “odd bits” of meat that aren’t usually consumed but can be a critical part of the animals we consume. The book is called Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal and I look forward to interviewing Jennifer about this later this year.
Jennifer has a section in her book on animal tongues beginning on page 49 where she acknowledges how some people get grossed out by the thought of eating a tongue. She recalled having “ox tongue” at Christmas each year that was potted tongue meat with jelly which she admitted was “not my favorite part of Christmas dinner.” She later grew to appreciate tongue more without the jelly and on a sandwich with sharp mustard instead. Jennifer says it’s time for people to give tongue a second chance to be explored. She encourages making sandwiches, salads, or just about anything that goes with tender, melts-in-your-mouth meat. My new friends from the Ancestral Health Symposium last month named Bill Staley and Hayley Mason (authors of an upcoming new cookbook in October 2011 I’ll be sharing more about soon called Make It Paleo: Over 200 Grain Free Recipes For Any Occasion) have an awesome Beef Tongue Taco Bites recipe. The sky truly is the limit!
Other than the novelty of eating a tongue, are there any nutritional benefits to consuming tongue? Absolutely! A 3-ounce serving has 19g fat and 16g protein with zero carbs. The protein in the cow tongue specifically helps to produce vital hormones and enzymes for your body as well as build lean muscle. Cow tongue is also and excellent source of Vitamin B-12 and other B vitamins. Zinc is another valuable mineral provided by the cow tongue which is merely a bonus on top of all the delicious meat you get to enjoy. So what was my first experience with cooking and preparing a cow tongue like? I took lots of pictures so you can relive it with me.
I can’t say I wasn’t a little creeped out by what I placed on my cutting board. My local farmer who I purchased the tongue from actually had TWO tongues processed and wrapped for me (at an affordable cost of around $11) and they were frozen solid. That required me to refrigerate them so I could get one of them defrosted to cook. When they were frozen together, everything was hard as a rock. But pulling out one of the tongues after being thawed was a bit surreal. Here’s what it looked like:
OMG, this a TONGUE! After getting over the heebie jeebies of that coarse tongue and blob of what would ostensibly be the meat I’d be consuming, it wasn’t so bad. But here’s a close-up of the tongue itself where you can see the prickliness of it:
I put the tongue in my crock pot, filled it up with water to submerge the tongue, and added in some Celtic salt, fresh garlic cloves and other spices. The broth this created by the next morning after letting it cook on low overnight (about 8-9 hours) actually looked pretty good:
Pulling the tongue out of the broth and placing it in a bowl, it really wasn’t much to look at. What is that alien creature in my kitchen:
Taking a sharp knife out of my drawer, I carefully started slitting down the middle of the tongue which peeled away surprisingly easily to reveal some luscious and tender meat that had been cooking in my crock pot overnight:
Using a fork, I was able to get most of the meat gathered and put into a container for me to use in a recipe. Here’s the good stuff:
I was tempted to try to follow some recipe, but instead I took on the continued adventure of seeing what I could come up with. I mixed in some cumin, garlic, peppercorns, Celtic salt and other spices as well as some macadamia nut oil to the meat to see how it would taste. Because that combination brought a lot of heat to the dish, I attempted to temper that by adding in some fresh blueberries and country-scrambled eggs:
The meal was delicious and satisfying! All in all, my first experience with cow tongue was pretty good. Christine still hasn’t taken the plunge to eat it yet. She’s got the whole mental block that some of my Facebook friends above expressed. I wonder if I just served it to her and she didn’t know it was a tongue if she’d eat it like she would a pot roast. No doubt about it because the taste and texture is virtually identical. Oh well, if she doesn’t have any, that just means more for me. And I’ve got another beef tongue waiting to be cooked. Maybe this next one I’ll pop in the Sous Vide Supreme. We shall see.
How about you? Have you eaten a cow’s tongue before? Why or why not? If you haven’t, then what is holding you back? If you have, what were your impressions of it. I’d love to hear what you think! Share your thoughts in the comments section below. This is but the first of my adventures in “odd bits” that I’ll be blogging about. I’m not sure what I’ll take on next, but you can be certain I’ll blog about it when I do.
