A butcher’s ‘pickled’ tongue: brined for four or five days in salt, brown sugar, juniper and peppercorns, soaked, then simmered with aromatics until very soft and peeled. Eaten hot, or cold on rye with mustard and horseradish.
Untested: not yet made in this kitchen. It is part of the collection’s pickled batch and is adapted from the source named in the Notes.
Ingredients
- 1 calf’s or beef tongue
Brine
- 3 quarts water
- 9 ounces brown sugar
- 27 ounces coarse sea salt
- 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
- 1 teaspoon juniper berries
- 2 cloves
For simmering
- 1 bouquet garni
- 1 carrot, chopped
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 celery stalk, chopped
- 1 garlic bulb, halved
Directions
Key ingredients
- Stir the brine ingredients in a large saucepan over low heat until the sugar and salt dissolve. Bring to a boil, turn off the heat and cool completely.
- Put the tongue in a plastic container, pour the cold brine over, and weigh it down under the liquid with something heavy, such as a ceramic bowl. Refrigerate 4–5 days.
- On day five, lift it out of the brine and soak it overnight in fresh water in the refrigerator.
- Put the tongue in a pot with the simmering ingredients and water to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce to low and simmer 3½–5 hours, depending on its kind and size, until very soft. Peel away the rubbery outer skin while warm.
- Serve hot or cold, sliced thin, with horseradish and mustard.
Notes
Source Adapted from Chichi Wang, “Pickled Tongue” (“The Nasty Bits”), Serious Eats.
Pickled in the butcher’s sense There is no vinegar and no curing salt: “pickle” here is the old word for a salt brine, the same sense as corned beef. Without nitrite the meat cooks grey rather than deli pink. The Pickled section’s Pickled Meat page explains the word.
Storage Refrigerate throughout, and treat the cooked tongue as any cooked meat (3–4 days).
Serving The source compares it to corned beef or pastrami — perfect between two slices of rye bread, with horseradish, mustard and maybe a dill pickle.
The photo The photograph is a stand-in: a cooked beef tongue dish, not this pickled tongue.