Sweet and Sour Tongue

tl;dr

Ingredients:

  • 1.5 kg tongue (about three lbs?)
  • 0.35 kg dried fruit, I prefer apricots and raisins (about 12 oz?) (you can use less, see below)
  • 1 can of tomato sauce, about 15 ounces or 450 grams 
  • 1.5 cups water
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
Yes, I know this isn't exact. It's also not baking, so, whatever.

Preparation:

  • Thaw the tongue and boil for at least three hours at a low boil and make sure the water covers the meat.
  • It's done when you can stick a fork in and it comes out reasonably easily.
  • Let it cool, peel it and slice it thin, and put it into a skillet with a lid.
  • For the sauce, combine everything into a little pot, and bring it to a boil.
  • Pour the sauce over the tongue, and simmer for 45 minutes.
  • Enjoy!
You can stop reading now, the rest is me rambling. I may edit this post at some point.

I normally don't post recipes here unless I've tried them and gotten good reactions from the people eating them. But preparing tongue for people can be a little funny. People hear "tongue" and think, "eww". People say, "how do I know when I'm done eating?" and "I don't want to taste something that can taste me back!", and sometimes, when looking at a beef tongue, people get squeamish. I don't understand this personally, but I've seen it too often for me to think it's uncommon.

Despite this, I'm posting the recipe. I prepared it this morning, and it smells amazing, and I've always loved tongue.

I'm sure this would work for lamb tongue as well. It's a pretty simple recipe. The recipe is pretty forgiving, so feel free to multiply, divide, and adjust to taste. You will anyway. This morning I used less tongue because the tongue came in a 1.1 kg package. Oh, well.

If it's frozen, thaw it. Dump it into a pot, and make sure the water covers the meat. Cook (simmer or light boil) for at least three hours. If you stick a fork in it and it comes out reasonably easily, that's good enough. I left the lid off the pot, and I was forced to add boiling water from time to time to keep the meat covered.

When it's done, take it out and let it cool. I put mine on a cutting board and washed the pot. While the meat was cooling, on the cutting board, I started the next step.

Start with a can of tomato sauce. I used the Leibers tomato sauce that you sometimes see in Osher Ad around Pesach. It said 15 oz on the label. Add 1.5 cups of water. Add 1/2 cup of brown sugar (or maybe honey? Dunno, maybe I'll try that next time). Add in some dried fruit. I wanted to use dried apricots, but they weren't available in the makolet, so I used: 4 oz raisins, 4 oz dried cranberries, and 4 oz small dried prunes. But any good dried fruit will serve, as long as you think it'll taste good. Mix it up in the pot, and put it on a flame. Stir once in a while. When it's boiling, shut it off.

Hopefully, the tongue has cooled. If you can handle it with your (clean!!!) hands without ouch, it's probably cool enough. Peel the tongue. I know some people don't bother doing that, and personally, I like it either way. But for the "eew" crowd, it's probably necessary. Peeling isn't hard if it's cooked and cooled off.

Slice the tongue reasonably thin and put it into a pan. Pour the sauce over the tongue, and give it a mix so the meat is fully submerged in the sauce. Put it on the stove, and set it to a slow simmer. Remember, at this point, everything is cooked, you're just trying to incorporate the flavors. I left it simmering for 45 minutes.

Take it off the fire. You're done. 

Since this is for tonight (Rosh Hashanna) I let it cool, put it into a glass dish with a lid, and stuck it in the refrigerator for later.

Followup: It came out good, but needs tweaking. The sauce was a little too sweet. Maybe it'd have been different had I used apricot, and maybe fewer raisins. Also, when we re-heated it, we should have covered it with foil, because the top pieces got a little dry.



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