How to quickly clean beef tongue in your home kitchen?

Unfortunately, not all housewives know how to properly cook beef tongue, and often deny themselves and their loved ones an original addition to the usual menu. However, such an oversight is easy to correct.

Is beef tongue worth the effort?

Indeed, it will take a long time to prepare this offal. It only takes about three hours to cook it. And if we remember the rather high cost, many people think about the feasibility of such “sacrifices”. But beef tongue with its positive qualities in cooked dishes tip the scales in favor of its frequent use.

• It contains many minerals, including vitamins B and PP, and a lot of zinc, which is rarely found in such quantities. There are iodine, potassium, phosphorus, iron and other substances with which the body can stabilize the production of hormones and amino acids.
• Facilitates the body's production of insulin, which is especially useful for diabetics.
• Promotes tissue regeneration, which allows it to be included in the menu of postoperative patients.
• Improves skin condition, makes it more elastic, slows down the aging process.
• The lack of connective tissue makes it useful for patients with gastritis, ulcers and anemia.
• Helps reduce blood cholesterol levels.
• Nutritionists suggest using the boiled version of the product as the basis of weight loss diets, since it contains a lot of protein and a moderate amount of fat.

Advice

It is better for older people not to get too carried away with dishes based on beef tongue, since it contains a lot of fat and can damage weakened kidneys or liver.

What to peel raw and what to peel cooked?

In order for the beef tongue to be tender and have a pleasant taste, you need to clean it properly. The procedure is carried out in two stages.

1. A raw tongue must be cleaned of dirt, mucus or remaining blood. Before this, the offal is soaked for at least half an hour, or better yet for an hour, in cold water. Anything that needs to be cleaned will become wet, making it much easier to remove waste from the surface of the tongue. After removing the meat from the water, pat it dry with a paper towel. Clean thoroughly, but with light movements, scraping off any unpleasant residue, while at the same time cutting off any remaining meat from the neck and fat, if any. Wash before cooking in running cold water. The skin remains uncovered for now.
2. The second stage of cleaning takes place after the beef tongue has already been cooked. It is immersed in cold water, boiled after boiling for 15 minutes, the boiling water is drained, the pan and meat are washed. The next time it goes straight into fresh boiling water, where it cooks for 2.5-3.5 hours, depending on the size of the piece and how young the animal was. Together with it you can boil bay leaves, onions and carrots. You can add salt to the broth only at the last phase, when readiness is almost reached. Otherwise, the delicate product will turn into hard fibers.

After the beef tongue is ready, place it directly from boiling water into cold water for a minute.

Advice

In order to check readiness, you need to pierce the offal with a knife. A clear liquid will be released from the finished tongue. If the meat is still damp, the liquid will be cloudy.

Further cleaning will be very easy: the skin begins to easily separate from the surface of the meat, you can pick it up in one place with a knife and pull it off almost entirely from the entire surface.

Advice

You can clean your tongue after cooking only until it cools down. If you leave the film, all you have to do later is cut it off with a knife.

When does benefit turn into harm?

Poor-quality beef tongue can cause illness, and its excessive quantity can provoke relapses of chronic diseases. This happens when one of the following conditions occurs.

• The tongue was bought boiled. On the one hand, it is convenient to get a product that does not need to be cleaned and prepared. On the other hand, you cannot know for sure which product was boiled, how much time passed after that and under what conditions the storage took place. Often tongues are sold frozen from other countries. In this case, when boiled, they can spoil very quickly.
• Beef tongue was purchased at spontaneous markets. When purchasing, you must require a certificate for the right to sell. In laboratories, meat is checked for the presence of hormones, the amount of antibiotics and other harmful additives. If you use the services of spontaneous markets, you can get problems for your body.
• Too much product is consumed. Beef tongue in large quantities is harmful for patients with bronchial asthma, problematic thyroid glands and allergic rhinitis. Do not forget that there is an individual intolerance to any food, including even such dietary and healthy ones.

Do not deny yourself and your loved ones the pleasure of enjoying the exquisite taste of this domestic delicacy.Many dishes of Russian and foreign cuisines use this meat in various ways. Modern mothers have happily begun to offer it as an option for sandwiches in school backpacks: the volume is small, the taste is excellent, the nutritional value is suitable for a growing body, and even the most restless kids will not be able to get too dirty with such food.

If you cook and peel beef tongue ahead of time, the procedure will not seem lengthy. The product can be preserved for several days in the refrigerator by wrapping the pre-cooked meat in foil.