What Is Beef heart and How Can I Use It?
If beef heart has turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use it with confidence and how to choose it, cook it, store it, what to substitute, and 1 recipe to try it in.
Key Points
- Beef heart is a lean, dense organ meat that eats more like steak than liver.
- It is cheap and nutrient-dense, rich in iron and B vitamins.
- Cook it either fast and rare or slow and braised; a medium middle goes tough.
- Slice thin across the grain for searing, as in Peruvian anticuchos.
- An organ meat, so use within one to two days or freeze for months.
What is beef heart?
Beef heart is the heart muscle of the cow, one of the most overlooked organ meats. Despite being an organ, it eats much more like a lean, dense steak than like liver or kidney, with a clean, deep beef flavor and only a faint mineral edge.
It is all muscle, because that is exactly what a heart is: a hard-working pump. That makes it very lean and dark red and firm, with almost no fat marbling.
It is also cheap and nutrient-dense, rich in iron and B vitamins, which has made it a thrifty favorite in cuisines that waste no part of the animal.
How to Cook It
Beef heart goes one of two ways: fast and rare, or slow and braised. The lean, collagen-streaked muscle turns tough and dry if you cook it to a medium middle ground, so pick an end and commit.
For the fast route, trim away the tough outer membrane and fat along with any valves and sinew, then slice the heart thin across the grain. A quick sear or grill over high heat, pulled rare to medium-rare, keeps it tender and steak-like.
Sliced heart on skewers is the classic Peruvian anticuchos.
For the slow route, leave it whole or in big pieces and braise it for hours in liquid until the muscle softens. That is the method behind a Stuffed Beef Heart, where a long, moist cook turns the dense muscle tender and the stuffing soaks up its juices.
The big mistake is treating it like a tender cut and cooking it to a gray medium. There is no fat to save it in the middle, so it either stays rare or goes long; the unhappy zone is in between.
Substitutes and Storage
Because it cooks like lean beef, a flavorful steak cut like flank or sirloin is the closest stand-in for grilling, though it costs more and loses the faint organ richness. For a braise, beef cheek or another lean, firm cut steps in.
Among offal, beef kidney is the next nearest in spirit, though stronger and more minerally.
Heart is an organ meat, so it spoils faster than steak. Keep it in the coldest part of the fridge and cook it within one to two days, or freeze it well-wrapped for several months.
Trim and slice it while it is still cold and firm, which makes the membrane far easier to remove.
Quick facts
- In Chinese
- 牛心脏
- British (UK) term
- Beef heart
- en français
- coeur de boeuf
- en español
- corazón de res
Recipes using beef heart
There are 1 recipe that contain this ingredient.
Stuffed Beef Heart
Stuffed beef heart, an old Pennsylvania nose-to-tail dish filled with roasted chestnuts and bechamel-bound cracker crumbs, simmered tender then roasted to a brown crust.
