Slip of the Tongue

So if you've been reading this blog much, you'll know I don't mind eating things that some people may find strange or unappetising. I have no problem eating offal and I firmly believe that if an animal dies to feed me, I should use as much as possible, not take only the "best" bits and kill another animal. This attitude has caused our society to breed chickens with enormous breasts (wakka wakka) and tiny legs who can hardly walk and grow at twice the speed and are pumped full of hormones so that we can have a larger breast fillet. We like to blame the farmers who are so greedy that they selectively bred these animals to make more money when the truth is that they are struggling to keep up with our demand for the bits of animals that we want.
Wow, I didn't mean to get all ranty like that, but it's a good introduction to what I want to talk about today, the wonderful world of offal. I love to experiment with food and when I found that one of my friends was butchering a cow on his farm, I was eager to try to get some of the parts of the animal I hadn't had much opportunity to work with and give them a go. What I brought home was about 1.25kg of liver and the tongue.

I'd never cooked tongue before, but I had eaten it on many occasions and quite like it. After searching the net and many, many recipes for cooking tongue, I came across this Colombian preparation that sounded like it might be worth trying.

To begin with, tongue takes a lot of cooking, and is not something I would do every day. Rubbing the tongue with cut lemon halves and boiling it for an hour reduced some of it's toughness, ready for peeling. Surprisingly easy to do, removing the outer layer of skin (with the tastebuds) left me with this result.

Back into the pot with some aromatics and stock to simmer away for another 3 hours and the cooking still wouldn't be done. During this time I topped up the liquid as it evaporated.

Then  remove the tongue and reduce the liquid.

I was preparing this as part of a lunch for a function of about 20 people, with this as the appetiser and a beef goulash as the main course (more about that next time). I was hoping that at least the few people who were a little more adventurous would try this and perhaps a few other too. Once the liquid was reduced, I strained it and refrigerated it and the tongue for finishing the next day.

The next dish I was working on for the function was a beef liver pate. Once again, the internet was my friend and rewarded me with many recipes from which to choose. I decided to combine two of the recipes that I found and which looked like they would taste great. This one formed the base of this recipe with some additions and substitutions from this recipe which is actually linked in a comment to the first one.

Prep work for this dish is quite easy, I simply chopped the onion, garlic and herbs and cubed the liver (not really worrying about the size or shape of the dice since this was going to be processed). This was also a good time to chop the butter so that it was nice a soft when I needed it. Frying the onions until the were soft, I added the chopped liver and fried for a few minutes.

When the liver was cooked evenly I added in the herbs (rosemary and thyme) and let it cook for a little longer.

 After this, I transferred the whole lot into the food processor and blended it until it was a fine paste. I then added a little butter:

As the paste reached a consistency that I thought was about right, I poured in some cognac and gave it a few final spins in the processor.

I then poured this into several large ramekins and covered them with melted butter. These went into the fridge overnight.

The next day at the function, I served the pate with morning tea and it went over very well.

The flavour of the liver itself was strong and really held it's own alongside the complimentary herbs and cognac. I was very pleased with the results.

Now it was time to finish of the appetiser for lunch, so I grabbed the tongue and put it back on the stove, this time to brown in some oil in a hot pan.

When it was browned on all sides, I removed it and started work on the sauce. Into the same pan I added the onions, garlic and tomatoes along with the reserved broth from the night before.

After this had simmered away for a little, I added back the tongue and the chopped olives.

I let it braise for about half an hour before removing the tongue and slicing it thinly and spreading the slices on a plate which I topped with the sauce.

If you are comparing this to the recipe I linked before, you will notice I left out the capers. This wasn't on purpose, they were sitting on the bench ready to go into the sauce, but I couldn't find them when I needed them and by the time I found them it was already finished. The result? The plate came back almost empty which I was very pleased with and the comments were very positive, even from people who hadn't tried this particular part of the animal before. The sauce was a real hit with intence tomato flavour with occasional briney bursts from the olives and the meat was tender and juicy, some people even came back for more until the plate was empty.

While quite labour and time intensive, it was a great experience to cook the tongue and while I certainly wouldn't have the time to make this regularly, it was well worth it for the results and to show a piece of meat that is often overlooked for its gross-out factor. The liver pate was very easy and I will definitely be making more of this and playing around with different flavourings to see what works best.