Corned and Smoked Heart

Name: Corned and Smoked Heart
Prep time: 60 min
Cook time: 240 min
Total time: 300 min
Ingredients: 1 beef heart (fat and silver skin trimmed); 2 quarts water; 3/4 cup kosher salt; 1/2 cup sugar; 3 TBSP pickling spice; 2 TBSP whole black peppercorns; 1 dried chili; 1/2 tsp cayenne; 2 cloves garlic (smashed); 1/2 ounce Instacure #1 (pink salt)

Barbeque and Smoked

Main

April 13, 2023

“Anybody who believes that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach flunked geography.”

— Robert Byrne

Today’s recipe is a matter of the heart – thoroughly underestimated and vastly under-appreciated.

Beef heart is a meat with a long history of consumption first out of necessity but now, out of curiosity and a penchant for novelty. Most people assume beef heart shares some unsavory characteristics with kidneys or gizzards, which couldn’t be further from the truth, because when cooked and sliced right, the heart meat could be mistaken for a luxury cut of beef. The only way to tell the difference is the absence of grain in the heart.

Cardiac muscle is lean, in fact, it is the leanest cut of muscle in an animal, and just like bison meat, it is nutrient-dense, rich in iron, zinc, and selenium, it is also a great source of B-complex vitamins (vitamins B2, B6, and B12). The cooked heart is dark-red in color, dense in texture, and has no prominent gamey taste, but is tough to chew requiring extra cooking TLC to tenderize.

Inspired by corned beef, today we will be preparing the heart, more or less, the same way it was prepared by the Irish Americans during the traditional St. Patrick’s Day festivities. This 100% original recipe, with zero duplicates, is an uncommon food design by the uncommon Mountain Man Radd and includes a six-hour brine, four hours of smoking, and 20 minutes of steaming to reach the ultimate reward of sheer delicacy and perfection.

To get started, we need to cure the heart with the same brine used for corned beef to afford the same characteristic hammy flavor. The flavoring agents usually include salt, a spice mixture, and nitrites. The use of salt is actually where the term “corned beef” comes from. “Corn” was the old English word for “kernel” referring to small and hard objects like …. a grain of salt, and since salt “corns” were used to preserve the meat it became known as “corned beef”. The high salt concentration causes the normally tightly packed protein filaments of the muscle cells to separate into individual filaments and weakens the muscle fibers, while at the same time, dehydration makes the tissue denser and more concentrated rendering meat smooth and tender.

The spice mixture is similar to that of pastrami which the Irish immigrants borrowed from their Jewish neighbors. The pink curing salt is a preservative that stops the growth of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria during the 6-day period.

Once you’re done bringing the corned heat is smoked for two hours because this low-and-slow cooking is best for tougher cuts of meat with lots of fat and connective tissue. The fat keeps the meat from drying out and the connective tissue’s collagen melts into tender gelatin. Smoking also adds a nice smoky flavor to food, which cannot be rendered any other way, and although it has been popularized recently, this smoking “fad” has been around since prehistoric times from the time early cavemen hung their meat in their caves to dry and the looming smoke cooked it and preserved it at the same time. Smoking is both easy and not easy. Smoking meat does take a longer cook time and needs more attention paid to the temperature, but the cook isn’t manning the grill/smoker for the entire time. They just check in every often.

Once you’re done smoking, wrap with aluminum foil to rest for 30 minutes before slicing thin. Our unconventional recipe is one of a kind and the novelty factor sure is a little extra sauce that intensifies this heart’s bold and rich meaty flavor.