Grilled Beef Tongue 牛タンの焼肉

We like beef tongue which is not always easy to get. We like tongue prepared Pennsylvania Dutch style; boiled with aromatic vegitables which gives it a nice tender texture which is particularly good as  a sandwich meat. Another favorite is tongue stew also made from Pa Dutch style prepared tongue. In Japan, the most common way to prepare beef tongue, either thickly or thinly sliced, is grilling it or “Yaki-niku 焼肉”. The city of Sendai 仙台 in the Northern part of the Japanese mainland is famous for grilled tongue. We tried it some time ago while we were there visiting Japan but we did not like it. It was very tough and too chewy. We recently found that Weee offers two kind of frozen sliced beef tongue. Although details were a bit vague, one kind appears to be thin sliced and the other is a thicker slice judging from the reviews. We got the kind that was very thinly sliced (#2). As per Japanese fashion, we seasoned it with salt and pepper and briefly cooked it in a frying pan and served it with wedges of lemon. Since we had left-over croquettes (potato with ground pork and chicken), we heated them up in the toaster oven and served them as a side. The thinness of the beef tongue slices really helped but they were still a bit on the chewy side.  Nonetheless it had a lot of flavor. This is good but not our favorite way to have beef tongue.

The tongue came frozen and vacuum packed (#2). Skin was removed and the meat sliced very thin. Once thawed, it is relatively easy to separate into separate slices. I salted and peppered only on one side after the slices were in the frying pan.

Knowing that the thinly sliced version of beef tongue from Weee is still a bit chewy, we suspect the thicker slices would be even more so.