pressure-cooked Beef tongue

2019-08-28

Beef tongue requires moist cooking to become tender. Almost every recipe boils the tongue for 3-4 hrs.
Advantage: plenty of delicious soup. Disadvantage: it takes at least 3-4 hrs.

The occasional recipe uses a pressure cooker instead.
Advantage: considerable shorter cooking time.

I decided to give it a try and dug my big canning cooker out of storage.
This 23-qt. pot is rather large for one tongue, but could be a real timesaver if you wanted to cook up to 10 tongues in a single session e.g. for a large wedding party.

Here’s my report.

INGREDIENTS

This is what you need for 8 servings:

1 beef tongue, 4 lbs.
pressure cooker

Pic1: pressure-cooked beef tongue

Directions

Pic2: before cooking
Pic3: after cooking
Pic4: all done

Wash / rinse the tongue.
Place it in the cooker. Add 1-2 cups of water.
Close the pressure cooker.
Bring to a quick boil. Allow to vent steam for 5 minutes.
Put the weight on the vent opening. Pressure should start building.
When the pressure reaches 15 lbs. and the weight starts hissing, reduce heat and adjust to maintain 13 lbs. of pressure. Maintain at 13 lbs. for the recommended time.
Online recipes recommend 90 minutes cooking time. That is too much for a 23-qt. cooker. This tongue was a bit overcooked. 60 minutes would probably more than enough.
Allow the pressure to release by natural cooling.
When the safety pops down, carefully open the lid.
Remove the tongue. Allow to cool enough for safe handling.

Pic5: a bit overdone
Pic6: refrigerate to harden the meat
Pic7: refrigerated

Peel the tongue.
This tongue was overcooked, came apart when I peeled it (Pic5) and I couldn’t slice it cleanly.
I refrigerated the tongue for an hour or so; then it went a lot better.
Notice that in that 1 hr., uncovered refrigeration, the tongue turned black. (Pic7)

Pic8: slicing
Pic9: sliced
Pic10: stored in broth

Slicing was a lot easier when the tongue had been refrigerated for 1 hr.
Store the sliced tongue covered with broth (Pic10) to avoid it drying out and turning black.

My COMMENTS:

COLOR:
Beef tongue turns dark when exposed to air. Notice the much darker color after pressure cooking, (Pic4) compared to boiling. When you refry for tacos, it also turns very dark. If you do not cover it in the refrigerator, (Pic6) it will turn nearly black in an hour or so. (Pic8) However, this is only a thin surface layer, as can be seen in Pic7+9. It does change the flavor.
STORAGE:
To avoid this darkening, I always store beef tongue completely covered with broth. (Pic10)
SALT:
Do not add salt to the pressure cooker. It won’t penetrate the skin, and you peel that skin away after cooking. The meat comes out quite bland. I stored this overnight in some (beef or chicken) broth that had some salt. (Pic10) By the next morning, it tasted a lot better.
FLAVOR:
When you boil a tongue in 10 qts of water, you do get a very strong beef broth, but that also weakens the meaty flavor of the tongue. This does not happen with pressure-cooking. I only had 2 cups of broth from this, about the same amount of water I started with.
If you've never cooked tongue this way, you may be surprised how much beefier it tastes. This is definitely the way to go for tacos de lengua where you want that extra flavor. I liked it.

See also: Deming, NM gardens, animals and more and avemariasongs.org

See also: Deming, NM gardens, animals and more
and avemariasongs.org