Nose To Tail At Home

To serve four

Looks like this will be another two update week. Sorry about that. I was working all last week on a few interview questions sent to me by AndrewZimmern.com. My wife and I are–strangely enough–huge Bizarre Foods fans, so I was agonizing over every syllable. I’ll post a link to the interview this Wednesday when it’s published.

After the ox tongue recipes turned out so well earlier, I was really looking forward to making this recipe. I picked these lovely little tongues up from the same place I grabbed the lamb brains, Zituna World Food Market in Richardson, TX. I ended up throwing them in the freezer until later, because I was pretty lambed out after eating three brains recipes in a row.

The tongues were placed in a medium sized pot with a whole head of garlic and a bouquet garni. I then added enough chicken stock to fill the pot and brought it all to a boil.

Once a boil was achieved, the heat was turned down and the tongues were left to simmer for a few hours.

In the meantime, I began peeling and chopping the turnips. I need to start using turnips more often in my home cooking, I had forgotten how good they are. It’s so easy to turn to potatoes instead of considering other root vegetables.

Finally, the tongues were nice and soft so I pulled them out of the broth …

… only to place the turnip pieces in their place. When the turnip was cooked fully, I pulled the stock off the heat.

Just like with the ox tongue, peeling the lamb tongues was just like peeling the rubber off an old basketball. It was fairly simple, but of course there were little bits that just didn’t want to let go of the meat. With a little coaxing though, those little bits of skin came off. You can make out a few taste buds that stuck around. The tongues were placed in the cooling stock and set aside for little while.

In a skillet, I started browning a bunch of shallots, which were popped into a medium hot oven until they were softened.

As the shallots cooked, I took the tongues out of the stock and sliced them all in half. The shallots had fully cooked at this point, so I took them out of the oven, put the pan back over heat …

… and added hefty amount of smoked ham hock pieces along with the tongue halves and the cooked turnip. The recipe asks for smoked streaky bacon, but I just couldn’t find decently large hunks of unsliced bacon. I’m to the point where I’m just about to buy a smoker so I can make my own bacon for these recipes. I turned the heat up on the pan and slightly colored the added ingredients.

Finally, the chicken stock I used to cook the tongues and turnips was added to the pan, and brought up to a boil. On top of that I piled on a huge mound of turnip greens, covered the pan, and let the whole thing sit for a few minutes.

Here’s the completed dish. The tongues themselves were hands down the most tender pieces of meat I’ve ever had, with the turnip and bacon adding just the right amount of flavor and bite. The dish as a whole is like a jigsaw puzzle: as you’re putting it together, you find pieces that don’t seem to fit or even really belong in the picture on the box. Once the puzzle is completed though, it all makes sense.

Sometimes, I fear that I’m so enamored with Mr. Henderson and St. John that I’ll think that the dishes I prepare are actually much better than they really are, and I’m just overlooking obvious flaws with them. Then, I remind myself that St. John has won numerous awards and accolades, including Best British and Best overall London Restaurant at the 2001 Moet & Chandon Restaurant Awards. It has also been consistently placed in Restaurant’s annual list of the Top 50 restaurants in the world. This recipe was so wonderful, so tasty, that if you were to ask me right now what I’d want for my last meal, I’d have to say “Lamb’s tongues, turnips, and bacon from St. John.”

One down, one hundred and nine to go.