― Anthony Bourdain
I know it sounds bizarre when its titled tongue salad. But to think of it, if you are a meat eater, this should not bother you. As the quote above says, you will enjoy this new ride in the amusement park if you are adventurous won't you. My dad loved eating the bizarre and I can't tell you all the stuff he did gorge on but some of the civilized names would be goat brain, shark liver, beef tongue and intestine, kidneys, chicken feet, tortoise, pigeons, goat trotter, gizzards and livers of fowl and few reptiles ( yes he was an impartial non- vegetarian). So I grew up in a household where brain curry and tongue salads were common diet and nothing exotic. When I would describe this to my hubby he would sigh and pester me to cook these stuff. We never found the required cuts so far and I vaguely remembered the procedures mom carried out, so was not confident enough to try many of these recipes. So with mom's visit this time and her longer stay we decided to reap this occasion and mom was all enthu too. She had not cooked these stuff in a long time because she had no crowd to entertain back home. And so mom drew up a chart and decided what she would cook to contribute to the blog ( she was happy to know I have a mom's collection label ) in return I was to bake some breads and cakes for her. So we struck a deal and mom taught us her famous tongue salad and I taught her pull apart bread.
Ingredients for Tongue salad
Beef tongue- 500 gm
Onions- 2 small
Soy sauce- 2 tbsp
Dry red chillies- 2
Salt- to taste
Pepper- 1 tsp powdered
Paprika- 1 tsp
Cucumbers- 4 diced
Tomatoes- 3 diced
Lettuce- 12- 16 leaves
Direction
The first step is to burn the skin off the tongue, boiling helps too, but mom sticks to the grilling method. If you burn the skin it peels off, though this step is quite tedious and require patience. Once the skin comes off it looks like a slab of meat. Wash the meat and marinate it with soy sauce, salt, pepper and paprika for 4 hours. We refrigerated it in this period. After four hours cook the marinated meat with onions and dry chilies in a pressure cooker up to 4-5 whistles. Once the pressure has settled cool the meat before slicing it into thin slices. We made a salad with this meat but you can also reserve it for cold sandwiches.
For the salad slice the cucumber and tomatoes. Decorate the plate with lettuce leaves, cucumbers and tomatoes and the meat. Sprinkle some salt and pepper, drizzle some olive oil and your salad is ready. The same ingredients go into the cold sandwich along with some mayo smeared onto the bread slices. I deeply apologize for the poor lighting, we made this for dinner and this was the best my cam could do, and I regret it a lot because not every day you get beef tongue for salad. Maybe I can make it up to you guys with the forthcoming posts :)
