People who love to eat also love to ask themselves questions. What will I eat, and what won’t I touch? Why? What are my limits, and what would change my mind? Can I put hot sauce on that?
All of these questions took me on a humble little journey recently: finding a cow’s heart, cooking it, and telling strangers about it on the Internet. I’d been vegetarian before, and ever since going back to omnivorism after a 7-ish years of meat-free living, my relationship with eating animals includes a lot of overthinking, a little lingering guilt, and an ever-evolving set of beliefs.
Part of these beliefs is the principle of not letting food, especially parts of an animal, go to waste. If a 250-pound pig leaves you with 140 pounds of bacon, ribs, ham, and loin, how much of the 110 pounds that remain can be used to squeeze as much human nourishment as possible out of one pig’s life? Not only is it respectful to try to do so, but it’s common sense. We travel as far as we can on every gallon of gas—and we don’t even have to raise and slaughter dinosaurs to make fossil fuels.
But let’s get back to the 250-pound pig. Internal organs make up a sizeable chunk of the 110 pounds of animal that don’t make it to most meat counters. As such, that is where we can begin the lifelong project of eating animals more efficiently and more consciously. I wanted to find out for myself that offal-eating can be done, and that it can easily be incorporated into the meat eater’s lifestyle. For every Sunday ribeye and Labor Day round of burgers, perhaps a heart here, a liver there. This doesn’t have to be the new normal—but every small change makes a difference.
Of course, this is normal in many parts of the world. It’s only revolutionary and new to people like me, who grew up in a culture that doesn’t include chicken heads and tripe in the same category as chicken nuggets and pork shoulder roasts. Oddly enough (not), the monstrosity that is pink slime somehow had no trouble slithering into our diet.
Heart is unique among offal because it’s perhaps the closest you can get to what is familiar; muscle is muscle, whether it pumps blood or moves a hind leg. It didn’t take long to find a beef heart in Portland—I paid $16 for a hefty one weighing in at 4 pounds. This was after a $4 discount, because I hadn’t planned well enough to buy fresh beef heart and settled for frozen instead. (Thursdays at Halal Meat and Mediterranean Deli for fresh beef and offal, PDX folks.)
I had done a little homework beforehand and learned that either quick searing or slow cooking makes for tender heart meat, so to help me decide between the two methods, I made sure to pester the butcher with questions. He recommended frying it in oil, with onion, salt, pepper, and paprika. Even better with liver, he said. I filed that option away for another time and arrived at a final answer, the answer being what it always is: tacos. I envisioned beautiful tacos, with thin strips of generously seasoned, medium-rare heart meat. I planned on cooking them the best way I know how: Quickly seared in a cast iron skillet, with a towel designated as the smoke-detector-shutter-upper within arm’s reach.
