Immigrant Kitchens: Russian beef tongue

Russian Beef Tongue

When a farmer handed me the grass-fed, organic beef tongue from his heifer, I took it to my two Russian friends to see what they'd do with it. See below to read the recipe and story.

The Story

Every Beef Eater Should Read This

By Lindsay Sterling

Most animal parts come so deconstructed from the whole that I don’t think of animals at all when I’m cooking. Steak tips are steak tips. Hamburgers are hamburgers. This is perhaps how I’ve lived as a meat eater, in a kind of denial: I’m not eating animals, I’m eating meat. But recently I came face to face with an animal part that threatened my usual delusion. At a recent family reunion, my brother-in-law, Tom, gave me a gift from Vermont: the tongue of his young grass-fed, organic heifer. He gave it to me frozen, sealed in thick plastic. What a gift! It was special, priceless, and gross. I had never cooked tongue myself, but I recalled my two Russian friends, Alla and Yulia, reminiscing about the good old days of beef tongue in Russia, so I took it to them, hoping they’d know what to do with it.

In their kitchen, Alla took the thawed hunk of muscle out of the package. It was long and huge like a giant slug. Alla and Yulia looked excited. Reunited with beef tongue at last! I’d never seen a beef tongue before, so I was trying to act like I was totally cool with the fact that there was cow’s tongue on the cutting board in front of me. It looked a lot like my own tongue, only bigger, and it was blue-gray like dead people on CSI. As far as animal body parts go, tongue ranks up there in my book with bull’s balls as the grossest animal part I could think to eat. Sure, when you think about eating chopped up animal parts, it’s all gross: shoulder, leg, back, ribs, tongue, heart – what’s the difference? But the tongue just seems so personal. Like you might as well just boil the cow’s eyeballs so that they can look up at you, cooked, from a bowl of eyeball soup.

Alla simmered the massive tongue in water with bay leaf, onion, parsley, carrot, and salt for an hour and a half while she and her daughter made some dishes to go with it: mashed potatoes, sautéed mushrooms, and a garden salad. When Alla said the tongue was done, it still looked like a cow’s tongue even though now it was floating in a broth that looked like soup, flecked with pretty triangles of carrot. She removed it from the broth, peeled off the layer of outer skin, and then sliced the tongue crosswise into medallions of meat, about two inches wide. Finally, we were looking at meat. It looked good, like normal beef. And it tasted delicious. The texture was smooth, unlike the striated quality of other cuts of meat, and a little bouncy on the tooth. It was great with a little horseradish on top along with the whole meal they’d prepared.

When I was telling my mother about my squeamishness, she scolded, “Farm to table people need to grow up and get some tongue. Where do people think all the beef tongues go?” Tom told me that the other farmers he knows throw the tongues away because there’s no market anymore for them. Apparently, sometime in the last 50 years Americans became too cool for peasant food. They’d rather just throw undeniable body parts away than face the truth: most of us eat chopped up animals and like it. The whole experience got me thinking that we’ve got to bring tongue back in to vogue. Yeah, it’s hard to look at, but you could always just cook it with your eyes closed.

The Recipe

Russian Beef Tongue

(Yaziyk)

With Beef Soup, Mashed Potatoes, Sauteed Mushrooms and Garden Salad

As Alla Zagoruyko and Yulia Converse, from Tver, Russia, taught Lindsay Sterling in Yarmouth, ME, August 2014

Serves about 6-8 people

Cooking Time: 2 hours

Beef Tongue (and Soup):

1 Beef tongue

1/2 bay leaf

1/2 yellow onion, sliced into segments

small bunch parsley stems

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 carrot, peeled and cut into thin half-moons

small handful angel hair pasta

two small handfuls green beans, cut into segments

8 tsp pickled horseradish (or jar for the table)

Cover beef tongue with water in a large pot. Bring up to a boil and simmer with bay leaf, parsley stems, yellow onion, and salt. Simmer for about an hour and twenty minutes. Make the salad, mushrooms, and mashed potatoes below while this is cooking (recipes below). When tongue meat is almost done, add carrot pieces. Test tenderness of meat by piercing it with a knife. When it is tender, it's done (after about an hour and half of cooking).

Remove tongue from broth and place on cutting board. While the tongue is cooling briefly, make a soup out of its cooking broth in the pot by simply breaking a small handful of angel hair pasta over the pot so that 1 inch segments fall into the broth. Then add a handful or two of green bean segments. Once the green beans and noodles are cooked, turn off heat.

Carve off any additional meat attached to the tongue, cut it into bite-sized pieces, and add them to the soup. Peel off and discard the dark skin layer from the tongue, and slice the tongue crosswise to make 1/4 inch thick medallions. Serve on a platter along with separate serving dishes full of salad, sautéed mushrooms and mashed potatoes.

Salad:

1 small head lettuce

1 carrot, shredded on a box grater

1 Tbsp thinly sliced yellow onion

1 clove garlic, minced

1 cucumber

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

3 Tbsp olive oil

Mix together all ingredients in a medium bowl.

Mashed Potatoes:

10 small-medium potatoes, peeled and cut in half

1/2-1 cup milk

2 Tbsp butter

1-2 tsp salt

In medium sauce pot, cover potatoes with water and boil until soft. Strain. Mash potatoes in the pot with a potato masher, adding milk, butter, and salt for the right consistency and taste. Mash as little as possible to achieve fluffy, not waxy, mashed potatoes.

Sauteed Mushrooms

3 Tbsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic

1/2 yellow onion, sliced into thin segments

1/2 lb. mushrooms, washed and sliced into 1/2 inch thick pieces

In a large sauté pan on low heat, saute onions in until soft, without browning. Add garlic and mushrooms and continue to sauté on low. Mushrooms will become soft and juicy, but then juice will evaporate. When it does, add a tsp butter and brown mushrooms.