July 14, 2010

Grilled Beef Heart

Jerad has been wanting to cook a beef heart ever since his parents grilled a deer heart last fall & raved about how good it was. After weeks of asking for one at the farmers’ markets, Jerad finally brought one home a couple weeks ago.

Once again, he researched online & found another video of Chef Chris Cosentino cleaning a heart. Unfortunately, as with the pig’s head, I didn’t get to witness this part of the process…and Jerad didn’t take any pictures. But, the untrimmed heart looked pretty much like this:


After all the fat, silver skin, & arteries were trimmed off, I marinated the meat in 3 cloves of garlic (crushed), a handful of fresh oregano, 1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil, 1 cup freshly-squeezed lime juice, 1/2 cup white wine, & 1 cup beer for 2 hours. We grilled the meat for 2 -3 minutes per side, sliced it thin, & ate in on heated tortillas with grilled peppers & onions.

I have to admit that I was initially fairly grossed out about eating heart, but I rationalized it by reminding myself that it’s just a muscle, just like (well, not exactly like, but close enough) any ol’ steak. The meat turned out to be tender & not “weird” or gamey tasting at all. It tasted like…well…steak. The only difference is that it’s very lean, with no fat marbling at all. Therefore, it was pretty dense meat. The thin slicing worked well in that aspect.

After pig's face & beef heart, I'm a little excited to see what animal part Jerad will want to cook next.

4 comments:

Ashby said...

I didn't know you could even eat bee farts.

Brownieville Girl said...

I presume we eat hearts most times we eat burgers!!!!

This is a really interesting post ... thanks, I love learning new things about any aspect of cooking.

Am following you now :_-}

drewseslu said...

I've got some goat hearts in the freezer I need to bust out sometime soon. Any thoughts on if they'll be tougher than more domesticated hearts I'm used to devouring (mostly poultry)?

Kelly @ Barbaric Gulp! said...

drew...

I would presume goat hearts would be tougher than, let's say, chicken hearts. You'll want to clean them like we did with the beef heart, and you should be able to marinate and cook them the same as beef.

Let me know how it works out for you!