Roasted Goose Heart "Waldorf"

A Recipe For Cooking Without Waste

(appetizer for 2)
1 roasted goose heart (recipe here for "Slow Roasted Date & Port Glazed Goose")
1 green apple
1-2 celeri stalks
1 handful roasted chestnuts
1 tbsp good quality mayonnaise
1/2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp Dijon mustard

Peel the apple, and cut into chunks. Strip the celery stalks of tough fibers, and slice thin. Peel the chestnuts* and break up into chunks.

Mix mayonnaise, lemon juice and mustard into a smooth sauce.

Spoon the mayonnaise sauce through the apple, celery and chestnuts and let infuse 20-30 min.

Slice the roasted goose heart thin. Spoon the salad on a plate and top with the sliced heart.

*roasting chestnuts: cut a small cross into the outer shell (to prevent the chestnuts from exploding when roasting). Heat the oven to 200C (400F). Sprinkle lightly with water, and spread out on a baking tray. Roast for 15-20 minutes, then wrap in towel (it will loosen the shell and make it easier to peel). Peel the chestnuts when cooled down enough to handle.

"Like" Life in the Food Lane on Facebook (click here) for updates on new posts and other adventures in the Food Lane.

Beef Tongue in Lemongrass Infused Stock

served chilled with Fire Roasted Poblano Salsa Verde

Beef tongue is a grizzly looking thing, raw and straight from the butcher. I feel like a weirdo when I have one in my trolley, putting it on the belt at the checkout. I can see people glance at "that thing" and then at me. Beef tongue, however is So Good! It needs a little work, a lot of TLC, and definitely it needs attention to aesthetics. Nobody wants to look at elongated tastebuds on their plate.




What IS so good about (a well-prepared!) beef tongue? It is the texture and flavor. A slice of slow-cooked beef tongue will melt on your tongue, its texture ever so soft and its flavor rich with the aromatics of the stock it simmered in for hours.

The essential steps of preparing beef tongue:

1. soak it (whole and as is) in ice-cold water, for at least a couple of hours or overnight. Refresh the water a couple of times. The reason for this: it draws out impurities. By refreshing the water regularly, you rinse the tongue as it soaks.

2. prepare a well-flavored, tasty and hearty stock. Aromatics such as onion, celery, carrot, garlic, bayleaf, thyme, stalks of parsley, etc work very well for beef tongue.

3. simmer the beef tongue whole in this stock for a minimum of 2 hours (a rough average is 1 hour per 500gr (or 1 lbs) of tongue).

4. take the cooked beef tongue out, let it cool enough so you can handle it. Strip off the outer skin (with the tastebuds). It will come off easy, looking like pieces of leather.

beef tongue salad with red cabbage and salsa verde

For The Stock
Enough water so the beef tongue is fully submerged
1 medium onion, cut into medium dice
1/2 leek, cut into rings
1/2 carrot, cut into medium dice
1 stalk celery, chopped
4-5 cloves of garlic, crushed
3-4 stalks of lemongrass, crushed (or less if you like)
a handful of stalks from parsley and koriander
black pepper to taste
salt to taste

Add all aromatics to the water and bring to a boil. Simmer the beef tongue in this stock for a minimum of 2 hours (see step 3 above).

Fire Roasted Poblano Salsa Verde
1 poblano pepper (or green chili if you don't have poblano, but be careful with the heat)
1/2 bunch green onion, washed, dried, and crown and harder white outside removed
2 cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped fine
1 small bunch fresh parsley,
1 small bunch fresh koriander (cilantro)
lime juice (to taste)
1 tsp raw cane sugar (or brown sugar)
salt to taste
olive oil to emulsify

Roast the poblano over direct heat until the skin blackens. Put in a plastic bag to loosen the skin further. Peel and seed the pepper, and chop fine. Give the herbs a quick chop: the finer they are going into the blender, the easier the blending-process is. Ideally, the salsa is done with a few pulses in the blender. This can be achieved if the ingredients going in, are as fine as possible. Add all ingredients except the olive oil to the blender. Start to pulse and as you do, add olive oil until the salsa is smooth and runny yet still thick. Adjust seasoning.

Slice the chilled beef tongue thin, serve the fire roasted poblano salsa verde on the side. Add another easy sauce: reduce some of the braising liquid (to intensify the flavors), add cream, whisk and serve alongside the salsa verde.

Leftover beef tongue makes for great sandwiches and/or salads!

leftover beef tongue on mushroom breadpudding

Veal Sweetbreads Grilled on the Camp Fire

skewers of sweetbreads grilling over hot camp fire coals

On a beautiful clear-sky summer evening in the Laurentians, my son was building a fire in preparation for a camp fire dinner. Earlier that day, I had made a baking-powder based bread dough that we pinned on metal bbq forks to bake right next to the flaming firewood. The fire was hot, the flames high. Some of the buns proved to be to close to the fire, and burned. But the ones that did not, turned out great, with a crusty outside and soft (and warm) inside. It was time to try out the next thing: grilling sweetbreads. As the logs quieted down to glowing hot coals, we placed a metal rack over the hot coals for the skewered sweetbreads.

They turned out great. There was a savory crisp of meat grilled over hot coals, and a very subtle touch of smokiness. I had used smoked wild boar bacon* in between the pieces of sweetbreads, which lend the tender sweetbreads a delicious heartiness.

As for the skewered sweetbreads: season with (coarse) salt, ground black pepper, and toss with a little lemon juice and olive oil. Skewer with little strips of (wild boar*) bacon in between (optional).

* Wild Boar Bacon

I go to Quebec once a year for the summer. The (relative) short time I am there, I try and make the most of the gourmet foods available. One such food is wild boar bacon. The meat itself is leaner, heartier. Its fat soft and melts away easily. For the sweetbread skewers, any bacon will do. As a matter of fact, while the tiny bacon strips do add a hearty flavor to the lean sweetbread morsels, you can easily do without!

Veal Sweetbreads & Wild Mushrooms

A treasure of wild mushrooms was spread out on my kitchen counter. Freshly-foraged golden chantarelles, tube chantarelles, and blue staining boletes. Not that I did the foraging. Well, not in the forest anyway. My foraging was done at the local farmers market this summer in the Laurentians. I must admit, the blue staining bolete needed a little convincing by the mushroom man. In my natural mistrust of blue food, I looked doubtful (to say the least) when he demonstrated why it is called the blue staining bolete. It literally turns blue when you cut into it. "But", he convinced me: "it is a delicious mushroom."

The wild mushrooms with their delicious aroma and earthy flavors would go very well with the velvety tenderness of veal sweetbreads that I had prepared. 

Sweetbreads. Velvety and delicate.

This is not the first time I blog about sweetbreads. And no, sweetbreads have nothing to do with sugar or bread. It is an organ meat.  A "pale, limp, shapeless knobbly piece of meat called the thymus gland found in young animals" as I described it in last year's post Oh Sweet Breads. There is the larger sweetbreads from the stomach (as in below picture), and thinner ones from the throat.

veal sweetbreads: a pale, shapeless knobbly organ meat

Tempted already?

While lean and with a calorie-count similar to white chicken meat, sweetbreads are also high in cholesterol. It is a meat I consider a special treat. Good-quality sweetbreads are not easy to come by, anyway. And they're a lot more time-consuming to prepare than, say, chicken breast. Once a year though - from my organic butcher in Quebec - I bring home a knobbly chunk of sweetbreads to soak, blanch, peel, and cook.

Below is a recipe for veal sweetbreads sautéed with wild mushrooms. If you have no wild mushrooms, button mushrooms will be fine.

the moment you cut into this mushroom, it turns blue where you cut it

Preparing Sweetbreads

First step: degorging. Soak the sweetbreads in ice cold water for several hours (up to 24 hours). This step is done to remove any trace of blood and your sweetbreads come out whiter and will be milder in taste.

Next step: blanching. Place the sweetbreads in a large pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil. If you have large (stomach) sweetbreads, simmer briefly (for 1-2 minutes, no more). Take off the heat and immediately dunk in ice cold water (it stops any cooking). This blanching-step is done to further clean the sweetbreads and also to slightly firm them up. It makes it easier to handle the sweetbreads. 

Allow the sweetbreads to cool under slight pressure (place a small weight on top of the (plastic-covered) sweetbreads). Again, this is done to firm them up for easier handling.

Final preparation step: portion the sweetbreads (either slice or disconnect the individual morsels you see). Take off any vein or other impurity you see. Also take off the outer thin membrane as much you can, without breaking up the sweetbreads too much.

Your portioned sweetbreads are now ready to be cooked as you would (raw) white chicken meat. In fact, you could replace the sweetbreads by chicken breast in this recipe.

Veal Sweetbreads Sautéed with Wild Mushrooms

(main course recipe for 4)

400gr prepared (see above) veal sweetbreads (I prefer from the stomach)

200gr wild mushrooms (whole or big ones torn smaller) 

2-3 shallots, chopped very fine

1 clove garlic, crushed and chopped very fine

1 tsp Dijon mustard

salt/pepper to taste

1 tbsp fresh parsley (and a little fresh sage if you have), chopped fine

1 tbsp double cream

1 tbsp unsalted butter

Season the sweetbreads with salt and pepper. Heat a skillet and melt the butter until foaming but not yet browning. Add the sweetbreads and sauté (= toss around in the pan as you cook them) until slightly browned and firm. Add the mustard, toss some more. Take out and keep warm. In the same pan, sauté the shallots until soft, and add the mushrooms. Continue to cook for a few minutes, then add the garlic. Cook for one more minute, add the parsley and the splash of cream. Add the sweetbreads back into the pan and warm through. Serve immediately.

See also Veal Sweetbreads on the Camp Fire Grill (recipe here)

Follow Life in the Food Lane on Facebook for updates on new posts and other adventures in the Food Lane.