Tongue, beef or pork, although it is considered an offal, but it is a real delicacy that can decorate any festive table. It can be served boiled, but aspic from the tongue, which has a delicate taste and texture, will look especially appetizing on such a table.
How to make aspic from the tongue
What products are required to make aspic from the tongue
For aspic, you can use both beef and pork tongue. The size of the pork tongue is noticeably smaller than the beef tongue, but it is in no way inferior in taste. You will need: – 3-4 pork tongues or ½ beef; – 1 carrot; – 1 small onion; – 1 parsley root; – 1-2 carnation buds; – 3-4 bay leaves; – 3-4 cloves of garlic; – 8-10 pcs. peppercorns; – 3-4 pcs. allspice; – 2 eggs; – 25 g of gelatin; – fresh herbs; – salt.
How to make aspic from the tongue
Jellied tongue is very easy to prepare, and all housewives use the same recipe for this dish almost unchanged. Rinse the tongue before cooking. Peel the onions, carrots and parsley root without cutting. Pour some water into a saucepan – there should be enough water so that it barely covers the tongue, but not less than 1 liter. Put the saucepan on the stove and when the water boils in it, put your tongue in boiling water, add onions, carrots and parsley root.
Do not reduce the fire yet – before the water starts to boil again, carefully remove the resulting foam from its surface, the broth should turn out to be transparent. At the first sign of boiling, reduce the heat to low so that the broth does not boil, but languishes. Season with salt, add pepper and cloves, cover and simmer. For pork tongues, it will be enough to cook an hour and a half, for beef – 2–2,5. 10 minutes before the end of cooking, toss the bay leaf and garlic into a saucepan.
Remove the skin from the tongue, cut it across into beautiful slices of equal thickness. It is not necessary to make them very thin, 2-3 mm will be enough. Strain the remaining broth through 2-3 layers of cheesecloth or a very fine sieve.
To make skinning easier, prepare a large saucepan with very cold water. Take your tongue out of the broth and quickly dip it into water for 5-6 seconds, after this simple operation it will be much easier to clean it
Pour gelatin ¼ cup of cold boiled water. When it swells, place it in a water bath to completely dissolve. Strain the finished gelatin and add it to 1 liter of strained broth, stir.
Boil the eggs hard-boiled, cut the carrots from the broth into circles or asterisks, making longitudinal grooves along its diameter at the same distance from each other. Cut the eggs into halves. Place them, cut side down, in a jellied dish. Place some of the chopped carrots in between. Lay the slices of the tongue beautifully on top and pour half the amount of broth with gelatin into the mold.
Place the dish in the refrigerator to freeze the broth. Take out the mold, place the leaves of fresh herbs on top, the second part of the carrots and pour out the rest of the broth. If you want to decorate the aspic in a different way, you can see how to do it from the photo presented on the Internet. Put the form in the refrigerator until the moment when you need to serve the aspic on the table. Do this by immersing the mold in hot water for a few seconds. Then just flip the dish over onto a pretty dish.