Cooking Beef Tongue on the Wood Cookstove

I know this post won't appeal to everyone who reads this blog, so my feelings will not be a bit hurt if you skip over this one.  I think it's kind of a timely post, though.  Because of Covid-19's effect on the meatpacking industry, meat prices and availability have fluctuated hugely across our nation.  In our area, the retail price of beef was particularly volatile for a while, and farmers worried about whether they would be able to market their hogs and cattle.

A result of this was a surge in demand for the work that our local independent butcher shops do.  Last I heard, both of our nearest meat lockers are booked for custom processing through January of 2021, and I understand this to be a fairly universal situation in our state.  Thus, I imagine that there will be a lot of people who will be putting a beef tongue in their freezer over the next several months.

Now I know some people just cook tongues for their dogs, but I like tongue, and I dislike the idea of wasting good beef on pets.  Besides, the dog will get a few pieces of this meat anyway since there are parts of the tongue that have a little too much connective tissue to be palatable.

Here is one way to prepare it:

1) Place the beef tongue in a pressure pan.  Tongue can be a little tough, so the pressure cooker helps tenderize it.

2. Season the tongue generously.  For this one, I used seasoned salt, Mrs. Dash, onion flakes, and bay leaves.  If you'd rather, I think the bay leaves could be exchanged for a heavy dose of garlic with excellent results, too.

3. Cook the tongue for one hour at ten pounds of pressure.  I was not maintaining a very hot fire when the following picture was taken, so I just left the pressure cooker directly over the firebox for the whole time.  The fire wasn't hot enough to make the pressure regulator jiggle constantly, but it did keep it jiggling the required two to three times per minute.

4. Once the pressure has been released, remove the lid of the pressure cooker to remove the cooked tongue.

5. The next step is the one that will be most stomach churning for the faint of heart: you have to peel the tongue.  The outer layer of a bovine tongue is incredibly rough (as you know if you've ever been affectionately licked by Old Bossy), but once the tongue is cooked, the outer skin is easily removed.

6. Unfortunately, the shape of the tongue is still recognizable.  Nancy finds this particularly unappetizing to look at, so it is best to slice the tongue and rearrange the pieces on the plate.

7. At this point, I also removed the parts on the bottom of the thick end of the tongue which are heavy on the connective tissue and set them aside for the dog.  You could eat the tongue like roast beef at this point, but we were taking this one a step further.

8. Since I was going to put sauce on this meat for barbecue sandwiches, I chopped the slices into smaller pieces. 

9. I put the sauce onto the meat and returned it to the stove to come to a boil while I toasted the homemade hamburger buns.  I put different sauce on the meat than I usually do, and we didn't like it as well, so I'm not going to share that part of the recipe with you.

10. Enjoy the finished product!  Anyone who was not in on the preparation of the meat would never know that they are eating tongue.