Marinated Beef Heart

A short ten years ago, I was a vegetarian college student, just back from an exhilarating semester abroad in Spain, where I acquired a modest level of Spanish fluency, a new Euro-rific wardrobe, and a taste for Rioja. After college, I had my sights set on working in U.S. embassies, traveling the world on the State Dept dime. The plan was in place, I was set to take on the world.

Needless to say, I thought I was hot stuff.

So if you would've told me that in ten years, I'd be living in back in my hometown of Bismarck, spending my Sunday afternoon cooking beef heart in the fat I rendered off of it, and actually choosing to do so because I thought it would be fun, I would've considered you absolutely nuts. Or, at the thought of something so antithetical to everything I believed in, everything I stood for, everything I was, I would've become disillusioned and depressed and started listening to The Cure alone in a corner of my dorm room with headphones. So good thing you didn't swing by in your time machine and tell my 10-years-younger self that, if only to keep me from subjecting myself to The Cure, bleh.

Funny how things change. I'm completely happy with where I'm at now, despite the fact I never could've predicted my current circumstances. But seriously, you think I'd give this guy up? Things have a way of working out for the best.

So back to the, ahem, "heart" of the matter, if you want to freak out your co-workers, casually mention that you ate heart for dinner. You'll get some great looks out of that comment.

Our wonderful hobby-farming Aunt T gifted us this beef heart and a few chickens. We cooked up the chickens quickly, but the heart remained in our freezer for awhile, it's hulking meaty mass with globules of fat attached reminding me that I had no idea what the heck to do with the thing. But finally, this past weekend, I decided it was time to tackle the heart.

Even though heart is technically a muscle, it's usually placed in the offal category of meats, next to the liver, tripe, sweetbreads, and all those other nose-scrunching animal organs. This was my first offal experience. I was nervous. I needed a hug and reassurance that it would all be ok. Most of all, I needed advice.

As I took the heart out of the freezer to let it thaw a bit in the kitchen sink while I researched, I pulled out Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, thinking, 'Ok, Mark, let's see if you really mean EVERYTHING...'  Surprise, he actually did have one recipe for heart, but it was grilled veal heart.  A veal heart is about 1 pound of meat; my full-grown beef heart weighed in at nearly 5 pounds.  Grilling wasn't going to do it.

I grabbed my copy of The Joy of Cooking and it had one recipe for baked and stuffed beef heart.  I set it aside as an option and then I turned to the web.  This article was great, telling me more about the denser heart texture and giving me the courage to render some of the fat off of it for frying potatoes, but it didn't really give me a recipe to go by. Then I found this humble little Yahoo! forum with my answer: thinly sliced, garlicky marinade, quick sear.

Bingo.

While the heart was still mostly frozen, but yet pliable enough to get a knife into it, I asked hubby to start cutting it up. It was already cleaned of arteries, so first, he cut off the chunky bits of fat that edged the heart and set them aside in a bowl for my potato frying experiment. Then he cut the meat into thin slices - lots of thin slices, considering the heft of this thing, filling a large bowl. I mixed up the marinade, poured it over, and let it sit overnight in the fridge. That marinade gave me some confidence. It smelled so good in itself, I was sure I could marinate a dog turd in it and still have it coming out quite tasty.

No, I didn't attempt to prove the marinated turd theory.

The next afternoon, I got cookin'.  Rendering the fat was easy. I just threw the fatty bits in the Dutch oven over low heat and let them melt until I had a nice puddle of fat in the bottom of the pot. I cranked up the heat on the pot of liquid fat, thinly sliced some potatoes, sprinkled them with a little salt and pepper, and fried them up for some homemade potato chips.

While nibbling on chips, I started cooking the heart slices, letting the marinade drip off before throwing them in the pot.  The thin slices cooked quickly, and I set it out the first hot batch on a plate on the table next to the potato chips and took a bite.

It was good.  The flavor was excellent - the marinade was most certainly a keeper.  The texture was slightly more chewy than a roast or flank steak, but not in a bad way. Cooking it in the beef fat gave it a heavier mouth-feel that I wouldn't usually go for, being more accustomed to cooking in a light swirl of EVOO, but somehow it worked for this. I was glad we went with the thin slice route, rather than cooking it whole like a roast for two reasons: the slices gave more surface for the marinade flavor to cling to, thus more flavor and the chewy texture may have been more oddly apparent if cooked as one big chunk of meat with pieces cut off from there.

We dished up on a sunny Sunday afternoon and dined like kings on what was my first meal of heart, or any offal for that matter (hubby has had liver and venison heart before).  We ate up the leftovers as sandwiches doused with mustard over the next couple days. I can't say heart is going to be a frequent guest at our Sunday dinners, but I did gain some kitchen confidence from the experience.  Dare I say it, much like my college student self, cooking up beef heart made me feel a little like I'm hot stuff again.

Marinated Beef Heart
1 beef heart, 4-5 lbs., cleaned and trimmed of excess fat
8-12 cloves of garlic, smashed and chopped
About 2 Tbls. brown or Dijon mustard
1-2 Tbls. rice vinegar
About 1/3 cup soy sauce
About 2/3 cup olive oil

While still frozen but pliable, slice up beef heart as thin as you can.  Fill bowl with slices.  In a separate bowl, mix garlic, mustard, vinegar, and soy sauce; then whisk in olive oil, pouring in a slow stream while whisking. Add more marinade ingredients to taste, if desired.  Pour marinade over meat, mix, cover, and refrigerate overnight.

Heat fat (either the fat from the heart or vegetable oil) in a Dutch oven or large pot. Add slices of meat to hot oil in single layers, cooking quickly until browned, flipping to cook the other side.  Remove with slotted spoon and continue cooking rest of meat in same manner.  Serve heart hot.