The Gift of Tongues

It was tongue that opened my eyes to offal. About six years ago I saw it on the menu as tacos de lengua at my favorite restaurant in Gainesville, FL -- La Tienda. I didn't even know people ate tongues, but I knew that if La Tienda served it, then it was probably good. It was good. Really, really good. The tongue chunks were moist, tender, beefy and delicious. Bumpy (taste buds), bite-size chunks taken from what was obviously a giant cow's tongue sat atop three small corn tortillas with chopped onions, fresh cilantro, halved limes and salsa verde. The meat flavor reminded me of my mother's pot roast I'd grown up eating, but the texture was juicier and more tender. Whatever reservations I had about eating a part of an animal that was awkwardly familiar to my own body (given that I have my own tongue in my mouth), quickly disappeared. So did the tacos. It was a meal that I will never forget.

So when I saw a whole beef tongue being sold by the dairy folks at the farmer's market a few days later, I didn't pass it up. I wanted to recreate tacos de lengua in my own kitchen. I scrubbed it clean, boiled it, peeled it (more on this process later), chopped it, sauteed it with onions and served it with tomatillo salsa on warm tortillas. It was excellent, nearly as good as La Tienda's -- proof that tongue is forgiving. If you take the necessary time to prepare it, you are rewarded with great flavor and texture.

In Tucson tongue tacos are everywhere, from hole-in-the-wall taco bars to mobile stands dotted alongside many roads. And they are always good. The best ones though, like much of the food here, are on the south side.

Tacos de lengua at Birrieria Guadalajara

I recently ate lengua at Birrieria Guadalajara in South Tucson at the corner of 22nd street and 4th avenue. It's a brick-and-mortar taco bar that looks unchanged in fifty years. A Formica counter and a few bar stools separate the kitchen from the tiny dining room and a sliding-glass window opens from the side of the kitchen to a caged-in patio with more tables and chairs. The tacos come in orders of three and are all under $5. They are giant by taco standards -- the tortillas are the size of my face. They come with the usual fresh cilantro, onions and salsa, but are also topped with pickled radishes and carrots, which I'd never seen before. The tongue of course was delicious. Each bite was big and juicy, liquid-trailing-down-your-arm juicy. The acidity and spiciness of the toppings contrasted the mellow beefiness of the tongue.

Two blocks south of Birrieria Guadalajara on 4th avenue is American Meat Company, where last week I bought a fresh, 3lb beef tongue. I'd only eaten tongue on tacos and on tortas, but I guessed it would be good in just about anything. Like pho for example.

The broth for Vietnamese noodle soup, pho, is traditionally made from beef-marrow bones, the fatty, gelatin-rich leg bones. Tongue, with high-fat content and full-bodied flavor, is a perfect substitution. Every tongue recipe that I've seen begins by boiling or simmering it for two to three hours to cook it to melting tenderness. After that though, the cooking liquid is usually discarded and only the meat is served. In pho, however, the broth becomes just as important as the cooked meat.

After scrubbing it under running water, I put the whole tongue in a large pot with onions, green garlic, fresh ginger, fish sauce and spices (star anise, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, coriander and fennel seeds). I covered it with water and simmered it for 2.5 hours.

While the tongue set aside to cool, I strained the broth and returned it to the pot on low heat. When the tongue was cool enough to touch I peeled off the thin, inedible layer of outer skin -- it comes off mostly in large strips -- and then chopped the meat into spoon-size pieces and put it in the serving bowls along with raw meatballs, fresh green garlic and cooked rice noodles.

The hot broth was ladled into the bowl (it cooks the meatballs) and topped with fresh cilantro, mint, diced serrano chiles, bean sprouts, a few squirts of Sriracha and hoisin sauce and fresh-squeezed lemon.

The assortment of flavors and textures in pho are amazing. The crispness of the bean sprouts contrast the tender, but chewy meat. The broth is rich and beefy, but also spicy from the Sriracha and chilies, sweet from the fish sauce and hoisin, and sour from the lemon. It's a meal eaten best with spoon in one hand (which should be abandoned for bowl-to-mouth drinking toward the end) and chopsticks in the other, and washed down with a cold, crisp beer. The more slurping the better. I don't know if anyone else has eaten tongue pho before, but I know they should now. It's delicious, every bit as good as the stuff made with marrow bones.

A more traditional preparation of tongue is as a cold-cut deli meat. The best Jewish delicatessens across the U.S. and western Europe are well stocked with smoked or cured tongue. It is sliced thin and served as a sandwich with mustard on rye bread. The only time I ate tongue deli-style was recently at Shlomo and Vito's in Tucson. Instead of mustard, chopped liver was spread on slices of rye, and in between was a heaping stack of smoked tongue. Smoking added flavor and color to the meat, but it was noticeably dryer than in other preparations. It was expensive too -- a half sandwich was $10, but came with fries and potato salad -- owed I'm sure to the fact that Shlomo and Vito's is one of only two delis that serve tongue in Tucson, and it's located in the most expensive area of town. I bet you can get more tongue for your money at a deli in New York or Chicago.

Valentine Heart

My girlfriend gave me a heart for Valentine's Day -- a three-pound, grass-fed steer heart. We spent the evening together cooking and eating, heart the centerpiece of our meal -- a thoughtful and delicious gift, thank you Sarah.


A cow's heart is huge, about five to seven times larger than a human heart. Untrimmed it is a dense chunk of muscle, sinew and ventricles encased in a web of fat. As a meal it looks unappetizing -- tough, chewy, rubbery, gristly come to mind. It is a worked muscle (if the cow's alive, the heart is pumping), so the flavor is rich and intense. Most recipes treat heart like other tough cuts and recommend that it be cooked for a long time at a low temperature. In Larousse Gastronomique the suggestions are to braise or roast.

Surprisingly, beef heart is not tough. Even when cooked quickly at a high temperature, as I found, it can be tender if properly prepared. Both Fergus Henderson and Chris Cosentino have recipes for cooking heart fast and hot. I used Cosentino's version that is on the menu of his San Francisco restaurant -- Incanto -- for the basis of my own preparation.

For a heart to be tender it first has to be cleaned and trimmed. The various tubes and membranes on the inside must be snipped back to the muscle and the thick concentrations of fat on the outside need to be removed. What is left is a dense slab of meat, almost all muscle.

Next, the marinade is crucial. A balance of fat and acid is important not only to add flavor but also to break down tissue (tenderize). For our heart we used a mixture of olive oil, orange juice, garlic and rosemary and soaked the meat in it for two hours, the minimum marinating time.

The rest is easy: A blazing hot pan or grill is necessary -- we used a cast-iron skillet over the hottest flame our gas range could produce and seared the heart chunks for three minutes on each side, let them rest for five minutes, then sliced them thin against the grain. They were medium rare with a brown crust. The texture was tender, but also firm and meaty like tenderloin. The flavor was strong but not overwhelming, and a tad sweet. We served it over roasted beets alongside a fennel and orange salad.

Slicing thin and against the grain for tenderness

Today I ate testicles

Today is a day that I will never forget. I ate testicles, and I liked them.

Tacos Apson, a small, authentic taco bar in the mostly Mexican inhabited south side of Tucson, serves tacos de huevos de becerro (calf's eggs) as a specialty. They cost $2, 30 to 60 cents more than the tacos on the regular menu -- the specials are written on a dry-erase board above the grill. Like the other tacos the meat comes on a soft, warm corn tortilla not much bigger than a drink coaster, with no toppings -- customers help themselves from the toppings bar in the back. I opted to keep it simple and add only chopped onions, cilantro and squeezed lime. I wanted the bull's jewels, with few distractions.

On the sign is a taco-shaped guitar. The owner was the lead singer of a 1960's Mexican rock band, Los Apson.

Frank, the patron who sat at the bar to my left, is a regular at Apson, as well as several other taco bars in South Tucson, but Apson is his favorite. He restrains himself to a couple of visits a week to keep the 25lbs off that he gained when he was eating there twice a day and up to 30 tacos a day. They are all good, he assured me confidently. All except the calf's balls. He's never had them. "I won't eat that. You are a braver man than me." First bite taken, not fully swallowed, I said, "Frank! You gotta try this. I like it." He laughed and shrugged, what I took to mean "Not in this lifetime crazy gringo."

Like a soft, mild sausage, the huevos de becerro chewed delicately and offered a mellow, fatty flavor. The aftertaste was a tad chalky, but not enough to say it was unpleasant. They looked like sausage too -- opaque, almost white in the center with a reddish tint on the outside that may have been the charring from the grill, but sort of looked like veins. I would order them again, and plan to soon.

As much as I loved eating testicles, of the three tacos I ordered it was my least favorite. The taco de cabeza (beef head) and taco de tripa were the two best tacos I've ever eaten.

Taco de tripa on the left, taco de cabeza center and huevos de becerro on the right.

Cabeza at a Mexican restaurant used to mean the entire head of a cow was steamed on a metal tray with holes in it, then the meat was pulled off the bone, shredded and mixed with the steaming liquid and served with tortillas. Now whole cows' heads aren't sold in U.S. markets, but cabeza can still be bought in specially butchered pieces (mostly cheeks) at Mexican meat shops, or carnicerias. They are steamed or braised, often for far too long and become pasty and slimy. Not at Tacos Apson. There the meat is tender but slightly resistant, like ropa vieja, only not as chewy. The flavor is deep, rich and beefy. Little seasoning is needed, most recipes only call for a pinch of salt and a few chilies.

Offal at the Food City in South Tucson. The blocks of cabeza are on the left.

When I ate tripe on a taco before I went to Apson I thought it was horrible. I knew it was in menudo, which I love, but on the taco I ate it was slimy on the outside and unrelenting throughout. Chewing it was a battle. I think I swallowed a couple pieces whole and then surrendered halfway through. That tripe wasn't cooked properly. At Apson, they make tripe a delicacy. It's heaven. They clean it, braise it, season it and toss it on a cast iron charcoal grill, the centerpiece of the kitchen and where most of the meat is finished. It was brown and crunchy on the outside and warm and gooey in the center. Think fried duck fat, only the flavor was undeniably cow.

The charcoal grill in the kitchen at Tacos Apson

Sweetbreads

"Butcher Fred: Hey Maurice, why can't we seem to sell all of this weird glandular meat Rancher Bob sold us on the cheap? I tried it, and it's really good.

Butcher Maurice: I don't know, man... People just seem to get freaked out when I try to sell them on it.

Fred: Hmmm... what are you calling it?

Maurice: "Weird glandular meat we got on the cheap."

Fred: Well, there's your problem! You can't tell people about strange cheap organs and expect to make them hungry. We need to market it better, maybe give it a new name, something, I dunno, lovely sounding. Like 'sugarmeats' or 'candy steak.'

Maurice: How about 'sweetbreads'?

Fred: Perfect!"

Nobody knows the origin of the term "sweetbreads" or why it was used to describe the thymus and pancreas of cows, sheep and pigs. Scott Gold, in the above excerpt from his book Shameless Carnivore: a Manifesto for Meat Lovers, suggests the name was a gimmick to help them sell. One that worked -- sweetbreads are one of the most expensive offal cuts and frequently seen on restaurant menus, prized by chefs for their tender, creamy texture and delicate flavor.

When I tasted sweetbreads for the first time about a month ago I thought the name made sense. Mine came from a lamb, were dusted with flour and pan fried at Athens on 4th, a Greek restaurant in Tucson -- brown and crispy on the outside and rich and doughy in the center. Had they been powdered with confectioner's sugar and served without the lemon wedge, diced tomatoes, garlic and scallions, I suspect they might have looked like a funnel cake, and tasted only a little less sweet.

An Intro to Offal

Anthony Bourdain called them The Nasty Bits. Your supermarket's butcher probably calls them leftovers. But to unapologetic carnivores like me, they are proudly, offal.

Pronounced "awful," the word is derived from "off" and "fall" -- meaning the trimmings that fall from a hanging animal that has been disemboweled. It is collectively the organs and glands of a butchered beast that are not muscle (except tongue) or bone. The head (tongue, brains, cheeks, ears), lungs, tail, feet, testicles (fries), heart, kidneys, liver, intestines, pancreas or thyroid (sweetbreads), stomach (tripe), giblets (gizzard, neck, heart and liver of fowl) are all examples of offal. To some they are the never-in-a-million-years-will-I-try-that foods and to others their rich texture and complex flavors are a delicacy worthy of the gods.

Eating offal is not a contest. Not to me at least. I am not trying to gross out or shock onlookers or prove my manhood. I don't eat it because of a dare or a bet. I eat it because it's delicious. It is undeniably the most interesting of all foods -- the nuanced tastes and textures are different than any other cut of meat and the preparation requires more time and skill. Bourdain, in the introduction to the book on offal -- The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, by Fergus Henderson -- put it this way: "Nearly anyone -- after a few tries -- can grill a filet mignon or a sirloin steak. A trained chimp can steam a lobster. But it takes love, and time, and respect for one's ingredients to properly deal with a pig's ear or a kidney. And the rewards are enormous."

There are also philosophical reasons to why I eat variety meats (what offal is often referred to in American butcher shops). It feels good to eat the bits that are usually overlooked. If an animal is born, raised and killed and butchered for the one purpose of eventually arriving on my dinner plate, then I believe I am respecting that animal's life, however short, by appreciating all that it had to offer. It's a more traditional approach to eating meat -- our agrarian ancestors couldn't afford to be wasteful, they knew there was more to a cow than a steak and more to a pig than bacon or ham, and they made use of it. They ate it. And I bet they loved it just like I do. Food was better when it was simpler, before the prepackaged, boneless-skinless chicken breasts and before the frozen burger patty days that I grew up in. It's important that we get back to a simpler, more mindful way of eating, especially concerning our livestock. I'm doing my part, I'm eating offal.