Like I said yesterday, the butcher gave John half a beef heart, and tonight we cooked it after a long day of sitting on the couch reading, doing budgets, and watching this incredible video. (This man, who is an African American pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, should be the President. He is a genius. I am writing him in the ballot in 2016, and I am naming our child after him. Plus, Obama’s face during this entire speech is priceless. He’s so angry. Ok, I’m done. I’m not going to get all political here. Back to beef hearts.)
So if the thought of a beef heart freaks you out, I apologize. But in every culture in the world throughout time (except the last 30 or so years of ours) people have happily eaten liver, kidney, heart, and other organs. We’re the strange ones for thinking it’s strange.
Organ meats are packed with iron, making them a great food for pregnancy, and they usually cost a fraction of what you’d pay for more other cuts of meat. 3 ounces of organ meats contain between 5-10 mg of iron, whereas the same amount of beef muscle contains only 3 mg. Beef heart is also packed with selenium, zinc, phosphorous, collagen, folic acid and CoQ10.
Here’s an NPR story about beef hearts, and the source of the recipe I used. We also made some waffles with spelt flour, using this recipe and a waffle machine that was a Christmas gift from John’s sweet sister. The beef turned out wonderfully– tender, and tasted like steak. We both loved it. Between the heart and the waffles I was too concerned with eating to take any pictures of the meal as a whole.
If you want to cook beef heart, or any other part of a cow, please find a good, local source where the cows are pasture-fed. The nutritional content (and taste) of industrially raised, grain-fed meat will be completely different. Also, please read Jonathan Foer’s book Eating Animals.
So interesting. What is the texture like on the meat?
It’s hard to describe– it was pretty tender, no fat in the actual heart, though there was some on the outside that we had to cut away. More meat-like than liver, but smoother than regular cuts of beef. Not sure if that helps. The woman in the NPR article I linked to describes it as tasting “deeply beefy, with the faintest of mineral high notes and a slight chew similar to hanger steak.”