Tongue
The enormous cow’s tongues at my nearby Vietnamese market (16th and Washington) have an inexorable pull on me. I recently bought and cured one. It’s a pretty easy process, a good warm-up if you plan on corning beef for St. Patrick’s Day.
The only special ingredient is so-called “pink salt”, a mixture of table salt and sodium nitrite. You don’t even need it, but including it ensures a beautiful pink color. You’re going to want it for corned beef, bacon, and hot dogs, anyway, so you might as well get a pound of it. (N.B. the salt is dyed pink so you don’t confuse it with real salt. You shouldn’t eat it raw. Keep it away from anyone who might think it’s candy, like children and sweet-toothed roommates.)
The plan is simple: cure for a week then simmer for three and a half hours.
Curing
Curing is easy, and increasingly popular on a small scale. Brining a turkey, for example, is a simple kind of cure. Brining will typically use a 5% salt solution: 5g of salt for each 100g of water. This is enough to moisten the meat of a roast, bringing out the natural flavors of the meat. For tongue, I want something with a stronger, more assertive taste, so we’re going to corn the tongue. Corning is a very aggressive kind of brining, using more salt (10% instead of 5%) for more time.
To comfortably cover a 1.2kg tongue, I made 2L of brine:
- 2L water (or adjust using these percentages for more or less volume)
- 200g salt (10%)
- 50g sugar (2.5%)
- 12g pink salt (.6%)
- Spices, for flavor: a dozen black peppercorns, some bay leaves, a few crushed cloves of garlic, crushed juniper berries, and mustard seeds.
To make the brine, throw all of the brine ingredients in a large pot, bring to a boil while stirring to dissolve the salts and sugar. Let it cool, so the brine doesn’t cook your meat! Then dump your brine and tongue into a ziploc bag to chill out in the fridge.
A week later, the tongue comes out firmer and faintly redolent of spice and salt.
Cooking
Three and a half hours of simmering. Following Fergus Henderson’s recipe in The Whole Beast, I simmered the tongue with carrots, onions, leeks, celery, garlic, peppercorns, and herbs.
Fergus says to keep it at the “calmest of simmers”, after which the skin should peel off easily. After uncovering the pot, I discovered that my simmer of about 160F was a little too calm. The tongue was still very tough. Now, cooler heads might say, “No big deal, we’ll just simmer longer at the higher temperature”. But not me. It was late, I was tired. No, I decided to flay the thing then and there. I’m sorry: first, ‘flay’ is a little too graphic; second, look at this pathetic picture.
The skin didn’t “peel” at all, and I took to hacking with my knife. Look at all of that wasted tongue! Frustrated, I wrapped up the tongue and went to bed, leaving the cooking liquid to cool on the stove.
Re-cooking
The next day, I brought the (now heavily trimmed) tongue back up to a boil in the liquid, and threw it in a 200F oven for three and a half hours. No mistakes this time: my tongue simmered while I stewed. Then, miraculously:
It sliced like a charm. Meaty and succulent, with a vague hint of spice. It’s been great with eggs and as an accent to salads. Smaller than a brisket, tongue seems like an easy way to get that delicious “corned” taste into your life more often. The process was not my finest showing, but I’ll never make the “so calm it’s not even a simmer” blunder again. I’ve been playing with using the oven for simmering (like when making consommé), but now I’m a convert!
