Grilled lamb tails and testicles

It’s time to separate the boys from the…

Yes, you read that correctly. They were delicious by the way.

From our processor the lamb testicles come with a membrane still on. I cut off any weird looking tube parts which you might remember from anatomy class. Removing the membrane requires you to stick your fingers underneath there and loosen it, then you pull it off.

I brined the de-membraned, cleaned up testicles for about 24 hours in a sweet brine, with salt, brown sugar, and some spices. Then I cut them in half length-wise. I think cutting them in half was unnecessary: they cooked fast enough and it made them very messy on the grill. I put them on skewers, then I grilled them on a pre-heated grill over direct heat for probably about 10 minutes, flipping once. Eat them warm, fresh off the grill.

Just…try not to think about it, guys.

Grilled lamb testicles

I simmered the lamb tails in salted water with a copious amount of fresh rosemary for at least an hour. They were pretty tender when I took them out. Then I let them dry off on a rack in the refrigerator overnight. I coated them with a sweet barbecue sauce (not homemade) and grilled them on medium heat until they started getting blackened and crispy edges.

These were big, sweet, juicy balls, and the smooth, creamy texture felt really good in my mouth.

I also made lamb tails based on an Afrikaaner dish called Skaapstertjies. I copied that word from the Internet, to be honest, I didn’t spell it myself. The lamb tails were nice and tender but mostly a vehicle for sauce.

Tails simmered for tenderness

The tails were popular, mostly as a vehicle for barbecue sauce. There isn’t much meat on them, and you do need to simmer them for at least an hour and possibly longer; the grill time is just for flavor. Worth it if you can cook a lot of them all at once. That’s my tale, anyways.

Liver Dumpling Soup

“Liver dumplings?” you say. “Really?”

Unless you’re saying, “Leberknoedel! Sehr gut!”

But yes, really. These dumplings are three-year-old approved.

With a food processor this recipe is quite simple to make, and is a great way to make a meal with our healthy, pasture-raised pork liver. This is for when you want a mild, “hm, yes, I can taste the liver in this” and not the strong, “Wow! That’s a lot of liver flavor!” that you would get from something like a “paatay”. (Our website software apparently doesn’t know how to print an e with an accent.)

You will need

A large cooking pot, a couple large bowls, a knife, and a food processor.

Liver (Get GOOD liver. Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig! You could use calves liver or beef liver as well.)

Bacon (Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig!)

A couple eggs (Ditto, except from a chicken. Pigs don’t lay eggs. That would make breakfast too easy.)

Plain wheat bread (could be white, whole wheat, or sourdough)

Milk or cream

Bread crumbs or just some old extra bread

Fresh parsley or possibly some other fresh herb you like

Marjoram (dried or fresh)

Onion

Salt and pepper

Seasoned beef broth. (You could of course use pork broth, but in fact using beef broth provides a nice flavor contrast, and while the liver flavor really isn’t that strong, chicken broth probably isn’t going to be enough to stand up to it.)

Here’s what to do

Take about as much bread as you have liver (by size, not weight) and cut or tear it up into pieces. Soak these in milk or cream. Use your hands and squish the bread and milk to ensure the bread is soaked. Use enough milk or cream that the bread gets very full of milk, but not so much that the bread can’t soak it all up. Do this first so you can set it aside and let the milk soak into the bread while you prepare everything else.

If you get liver from us it ought to be pretty well cleaned already. Cut it up into pieces about 2 inches in size. You may find some tough parts, cut those out and give those to the dog.

Cut the bacon into about 2-inch pieces. Use enough bacon that you’ll be able to taste it, but you don’t need a 1:1 ratio. These are liver dumplings with some bacon added for the flavor, not bacon-and-liver dumplings. This would be a great way to use those “bacon ends and pieces” you got a good deal on.

Put the liver pieces and bacon pieces in your food processor and make pink paste.

Finely dice an onion and chop some parsley. Again, you want enough onion and parsley that you can taste them, but you don’t want so much that these turn into onion dumplings.

Like this!

In a large bowl, using your hands, mix the milk-soaked bread, liver-and-bacon paste, onion, parsley, marjoram (a pinch or a couple teaspoons, depending on whether your liver is measured in ounces or pounds), salt and pepper, and two eggs. The mixture will be very wet. Add bread crumbs or crumbled old bread until the mixture sticks together. You should be able to pick up a spoonful and turn the spoon over without it falling off.

None of this takes very long, but you could do this part in advance and just store the mixture in the fridge until you’re ready to cook.

Cooking takes about 30 minutes

In a large pot bring the broth to a boil. After you begin adding the dumplings, turn down the heat. The dumplings should be simmered, not boiled. (The cold dumplings will cool down the broth. That’s why you want to bring the broth up to a boil first and then turn down the heat to cook. If you add the dumplings first and then try to heat it up, it will take you until forget-it-we’ll-just-have-pizza time to get the whole thing up to temperature.)

Here’s what they look like while cooking

Using a soup spoon or other large table-spoon-ish-sized instrument, make “quenelles” of the dumpling mixture. (“Quenelle” is apparently a fancy French word for “a spoonful”. We don’t know. All the French people we know talk like normal people.) Slide them off the spoon into the simmering broth. You might need to use another spoon (or your finger) to help get the sticky dumpling mixture off the spoon. You can fill the pot with dumplings, just make sure that the dumplings are in the broth and not piled on top of it. After they cook for a bit they will float to the top; that’s fine.

Let the dumplings simmer in the broth for 25 minutes. As long as it is simmering and not boiling, you can cook them longer if you’re not ready to eat yet. We kept them on for 50 minutes and second helpings tasted as good as the first. If you are going to cook them longer, put a lid on the pot so your broth doesn’t evaporate away.

Serve the dumplings in the broth and with some more rough-chopped parsley. This isn’t a low-carb meal given all the bread and bread crumbs in it, so some nice crusty bread is a nice addition to help soak up the broth.

If the soup smells strongly of liver, do not despair! (We’re not saying it smells “bad”, just strong.) In fact it will likely taste relatively mild. It seems something about the liver flavor compounds aerosolizes quite well, but the smell isn’t an indication of the taste.

Seriously this is really good. Bitte!

Pork heart pappardelle ragu

Simply offal

Offal Simple

This is an excellent, earthy dish. It’s not like eating liver or kidney, everyone is going to like this. This would be a great dish to start on if you’ve never eaten organ meat before. You can make this entire dish in under an hour if you really want to.

The flavor of pork heart, mushrooms, and browned butter complement each other perfectly.

Have no fear, heart is very clean and easy to work with.

Prep the Heart

A pig heart looks like, well, a heart. It is made up of extremely lean muscle cupping four empty chambers. The first thing to do is cut through each of these chambers so that you can lay the heart muscle out flat, as seen in the photo to the side.

In the photo you can see the heart muscle laid out reasonably flat. There will be a thin, translucent membrane covering it. You probably don’t need to worry because you’ll be pulverizing this in the food processor, but you may as well cut this membrane off because you’re going to have plenty of meat as it is. Don’t worry about saving the meat attached to the membrane, just slice it off with a big knife. You can cook this up later (it cooks very fast) and feed it to a pet dog or cat.

You will also find some very thin tubes sometimes in the sides of the heart chambers. Cut those out as well or just pull them off with your fingers. They come away easily. Again, it probably doesn’t matter so you can skip this step if you want.

Just a rough chop to fit into the food processor

Finely chopped in a food processor

Probably because it lacks any connective tissue found in most other cuts of meat, the heart muscle is quite easy to work with and cut through. All you need to do is chop it roughly into large pieces that you can fit into your food processor. Then pulverize it. It should be ground very fine but not into a paste.

Prep the Veg

Clean and rough chop or slice some flavorful mushrooms. You want something like shiitakes or chanterelles, preferably not the standard button mushroom creminis.

Also clean and thinly slice the white parts of two leeks. An easy way to clean leeks is to cut off the roots at the bottom and most of the green tops, and then slice the white part in half lengthwise. Holding it together by wrapping your hand around all the layers, swish each half around in a pot of clean water. This will work water into all of the layers and wash out any grit that has been caught in there. Then you can slice crossways.

Chop some fresh rosemary. The leaves of a few stalks should be enough. Don’t overdo it.

Brown in Butter

Add a half stick or so of butter to a skillet pan or stew pot, something with reasonably high sides and plenty of room on the bottom. Melt and cook the butter at reasonably high heat. Your goal is to just begin to brown the butter, but not to burn it. A heavier pot helps with this as it will even out the distribution of heat in the cooking vessel. We use enamel-coated cast iron, which is expensive but absolutely worth what you pay for it. You know your butter is beginning to brown when it is melted and starts making the whole kitchen smell really, really good, like butter.

After the butter is melted and beginning to brown, add the ground pork heart. At medium-high heat this will cook quickly. Stir often.

When the ground pork heart is cooked, which will happen quickly, add more butter and then add the mushrooms. Keep the meat and mushrooms moving around in the browned butter on medium-high heat, almost as if you were stir-frying. You don’t need to stir constantly, but stay alert. You don’t want anything sticking on the bottom of the pan and burning. If the mushrooms soak up all the butter, add another half stick or so. You can also turn the heat down slightly if you need to do so.

Yes, it smells amazing

Cook the mushrooms until they begin to soften. Don’t try to saute and brown them. You want them cooked through and soft but not mushy and not sauted or fried. They should taste like fresh mushrooms that have been warmed and softened, not like fully-cooked.

Deglaze With Stock

Now add in pork or chicken stock to deglaze the pan. You need a cup or 2 at most of stock, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan to deglaze it. Lightly scrape the bottom of the pan with your spatula as you continue to keep the pork heart and mushrooms stirred.

If your butter is salted and/or your stock has salt, you probably do not need to add extra salt. Season to taste with salt and a little ground black pepper.

Add the leeks and fresh rosemary, stir again, turn down the heat to low and cover. Let sit on low heat until the leeks are tender. This is another reason why you don’t need to overcook the mushrooms before you add in the stock, since everything will continue to cook. By the time the leeks are tender, the stock will have been absorbed or cooked off. Chop a stick of butter into chunks and add it, stirring until the butter is melted.

Pop in the Pappardelle

To the final dish add fresh-cooked pappardelle pasta and mix well. The large, flat, egg noodles of pappardelle work best, but you could use farfalle or some other pasta with a large surface area. Don’t use something with a small surface area like spaghetti, or the sauce will just fall off.

This is a lightly sauced dish; you should add enough pasta to feed 8 people, more or less. You don’t want the pasta drowned in sauce, rather, each piece of pasta should just have flecks here and there of the ground pork heart, with a slice of mushroom in every few bites. A neat trick is to use a pasta server or slotted spoon to scoop pasta directly from the pasta water into the sauce pot. Don’t worry about draining off the water that is on the pieces of pasta. The small amount of starchy pasta water will help the sauce stick to the noodles.

Ask yourself why you wouldn’t add another stick or so of butter. Remember, the heart has zero fat on it. Mix again.

Serve with fresh-grated parmesan.

This is not a dish that is interesting to try. It is not a fun and inventive way to use up pig heart. Your kids are going to love this, and when it is gone you will start wondering where you can find another pig heart so you can make this again.