On the Tip of the Tongue

A week or so ago, I thought I finally had an excuse to try a new beef tongue recipe that I could share. An old friend of mine (we were actually quite friendly), a classmate from my grade school and high school in South Dakota, has been living in Michigan for a number of years and has made several attempts to connect with me. We finally agreed to meet at my aunt's place, with spouses, to sip cocktails by the pond.

My "old" friend and his wife had just returned from a game hunting trip to South Africa and told me that they sample all the meat he shoots (can't take it out of the country, however) and that he is a fan of Bizarre Food.

Well . . . a good excuse to try a gourmet beef tongue recipe! They would be game, I thought. So I took a tongue out of the freezer to thaw.

The weather that day was cool and it looked like it could rain any minute. We did eat by the pond but then retreated to our house to look at his slide show of dead African game animals and have some leftover Dairy Queen cake.

I had wanted to cook the tongue over a fire on the patio firepit, ala Gustavo--tongue al trappo, perhaps?--but the weather was not suitable, so I went with a plan B. The tongue sat in my refrigerator for days and didn't get cooked. Finally--I had to use it, so one morning I simmered it in onion, vinegar and salt. No bay leaf, this time. It got very tender and I hacked off the tip of the tongue for a taste. It was actually quite good--that very unusual texture which I remember so well  from my youth as a beef farmer's daughter.

So the promise of fancy new tips on cooking tongue will have to wait--Rebecca sent two tongues in that grass-fed beef shipment, and one is left in the freezer. I think the secret would be to come up with a sauce to serve with the sliced tongue, perhaps served on a small bread roll. By the way, when you eat tongue, do you say grass-fed tongue, like the tongue itself was fed grass???

I did take a photo of the portion of tongue I ate. The black is the skin over the taste buds which I rolled back. Looks delicious, huh? The next day I had a chunk dipped in ketchup. Gotta love anything with Heinz ketchup.

I tried to enhance the taste buds a bit as promised, but you can zoom in for a closer look, if you dare. Actually, I tried it. The ridges of the rough tongue surface don't look any different than my large, cropped photo.

A tip of beef tongue