Well That Was a Pleasant Suprise

Got talking with a coworker about people getting geeked out by certain types of food, and really screwing themselves over.

The best example is pig’s feet. Probably the best meat on a pig is between his toes….but most people aren’t willing to chew on the foot of a dead pig to find out.

Their loss.

This lead me to confess the stuff I don’t eat.

I won’t eat the gills of a raw bivalve. This essentially means I won’t eat raw oysters or clams. I will eat raw scallops because you don’t generally eat the whole scallop, just the adducter muscle. Bivalves are filter feeders, and the gills are the filter. Nope, not gonna do that.

For similar reasons I won’t eat a kidney. It’s the filter of the body, and a healthy kidney will have a VERY high concentration of toxic body wastes in it to drive osmosis. Nope, too gross!

Another I said was heart. My rational is handling them of various animals I found them to be tough and have a strong odor, and the few cooked specimens (all Chicken IIRC) I found to be unpleasantly tough and possessing a strong taste that I didn’t enjoy at all.

My friend replied that he had enjoyed some beef heart and found it to be VERY similar to steak with no such characteristics.

Which leads me to this morning. I was at the store and found a cut beef heart that was nearing the end of its shelf life on the shelf for 60c. In this store, if they’ve marked down the meat it’s going to be in perfect condition if: You cook it within 24 hours for Chicken, 48 hours for pork, and 72 hours for beef.

I cooked the heart for lunch:

Beef Heart

Now it came mostly like this from the store. There was one piece that I needed to trim some arterial tissue from, and one piece that was twice the size of all the others and needed to be trimmed for even cooking.

This made me VERY nervous, because it was very hard to trim the meat, even with a sharp knife…but curiosity spurred me on.

I heated up a cast iron skillet on high on the stove top, and seasoned the cleaned up heart with salt and pepper. I added some olive oil to the skillet just before I dropped in the meat. I ended up cooking it a little too much, so I suspect 3 mins (maybe less) on a side.

Even overcooked this meat was AWESOME! SLIGHTLY stronger taste than say a New York strip, and it’s leaner so it didn’t have that buttery quality (I suspect my parts were from the bottom of the heart, and didn’t have the fat pad that sits on the top…maybe that would make a difference). While this was no filet mignon you can cut with your fork, it was reasonably tender, tho with a much denser mouth-feel that really isn’t like any other common meat I’ve eaten.

So yeah, verdict was quite good, that goes double when you notice the HUGE portion of meat you get for the price less than a candy bar out of a vending machine!

**UPDATE**
Have a look at this!

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2 Responses to Well That Was a Pleasant Suprise

  1. Joe in PNG says:

    My Hungarian Grandpop, may the Lord rest his soul, was a pretty good chef, and was rather fond of the cheap bits most folks ignore. Thus, I grew up with chicken hearts in the chicken soup, chicken gizzards cooked with paprika, pigs ears, and our favorite, tripe both fresh cooked and pickled.

  2. The_Jack says:

    Oooooh, that looks good.

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