Now that my tongue is defrosted it's going into a pot with two carrots (tops included) two onions, a handful of garlic cloves, a couple celery stalks and about a dozen peppercorns.
Before I added the water.
The whole mess gets covered in cold water, then brought up to a boil for three and a half to four hours.
Boiling for about an hour and a half.
Once you can pierce the tongue with a sharp knife and there's little to no resistance it's done. Remove it from the pot and when it's cool enough to handle but still warm take that sharp knife and peel the skin off the tongue.
Tongue peelin'
The skin comes off remarkably easily. There should be a mound of tongue meat on the bottom of the tongue that I simply trimmed off and ate as a snack.
My snack.
This is a rather large piece of meat, so we'll be eating it for supper for a few days and I'll be having it for lunch a few times.
The taste is truly remarkable. The curing process it went through for a week in my fridge gave it a salty savory flavor with a mild hint of the juniper berries and allspice. The texture did not lose anything from being frozen, as far as I can tell. Thinly sliced the tongue is meaty and definitely beefy but with none of the offally liver taste that some tongue I've had in the past can have. If you put this in a sandwich with a nice slice of tomato and some mustard you could please even those who are dead set against eating offal. It's that yummy.
Fergus Henderson deserves all the credit for how well this came out. Although I did change a few things this is
his recipe for boiled ox tongue out of
The Whole Beast, which if you don't own already I heartily recommend.
For my first meal of tongue I'll be serving it with boiled potatoes, Fergus Henderson's green sauce and maybe some sort of veggie Right now I'm happily going to munch on my long awaited tongue, with a little dijon mustard.
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