Cooking with tongue
An important part of being a card-carrying member of the North London glitterati is the ability to harp on like a tedious idiot about buying the cheaper, more hilarious cuts of meat from the butcher rather than relying on neatly-packaged and sanitised lumps from Sainsbury’s. I’ve been letting the side down in that respect, so here’s a story about how I tried to cook some ox tongue the other day.
I’d been training myself up; I’d mastered the lamb shank, had experimented with ‘end chops’ (from what end, eh?), roasted some pigeon, formed complicated stews from chorizo and black pudding and had made kidneys on toast, but tongue was, I felt, a level up, and it was going to be that or lamb’s heart so I went with tongue because I suspected that all I’d end up doing with a lamb’s heart was filling it with liquid and gently pumping it all out again with my fingers, possibly while shouting “don’t you die on me!” and giggling at my own comic genius.
Disappointingly though, I didn’t buy an entire tongue, of the sort that looks like David Cronenberg designed it:
This meant no peeling, no cooking for three hours, no removal of the root. Instead, it came pre-sliced and pre-peeled, so all I had to do was cook it somehow.
Worryingly, my online recipe searching could only find recipes that assumed you were dealing with an entire tongue — nobody seemed to be working with what I had. Eventually I settled on this: I would fry the slices for a few minutes each side, treating it like steak, then slice it up and have a sort of corned-beef hash without the corned-beef, figuring that if it all went wrong, I’d at least be able to eat some fried potatoes topped with fried eggs.At the back of my mind I couldn’t help thinking that I hadn’t found anybody on the internet that had cooked tongue like this. If everyone was slow-cooking it, how was this going to work for me? Annoyingly as well, as the meat cooked, it started looking more tongue-like, and little parallel veins became visible, looking like something that would normally deliver venom.
After cooking, I sliced off a bit and gave it a go, and it tasted of matter. It was tough, chewy, and had no flavour whatsoever. An unappealing grey on the outside and pink inside, It was like meat before the meat has been added to it. Like meat from an evil mirror universe. Eating it made me unhappy.In the end, I guiltily discarded it and used bacon instead. You know where you stand with bacon.
Some better tongue recipes:
Ox Tongue braised in red wine
Japanese ox tongue curry
Boiled ox tongue