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