Home Made Luncheon Ox Tongue

The credit crunch has caused people to look at all areas of spending and one of the places most people can make a saving is by foregoing buying an expensive lunch each day and instead creating their own packed lunch.

However, for a devout meat eater like me, even a homemade sandwich can be expensive if you like a stuffed sandwich. Supermarket pre-packed meats offer very little meat for a whole lot of money at the premium end of the market.

At the bottom end, then you really don’t know what you are buying with all sorts of processing tricks going on, chopping and reforming and injecting all sorts of bulkers, preservatives and ‘flavour enhancers’.

But there is a better and much cheaper way.

Cheap & Delicious Cuts

Granny always knew how to obtain best value and to this day, I still remember the delicious home cooked ox tongue and mustard sandwiches that I looked forward to for tea. I can still buy pre-packed slices of ox tongue, but it is ridiculously expensive bought in this fashion.

One of my earlier barriers to cooking my own ox tongue was the ability to press it into a nice neat shape for slicing, but I came across Cast in Style who specialise in products manufactured in cast iron and sell a great range of cast iron products for all around the home from kitchenware to boot scrapers.

Cast in Style supply a meat press just like my Grandmother used in her kichen turning the cheap ox tongue into a beautiful cut of meat for use in salads, sandwiches etc, and I ordered a meat press from them.

Cooking & Preparing Ox Tongue

In anticipation of delivery, I purchased a cured ox tongue. Note: the tongue must be cured in order to fix the pink/purple colour, otherwise it will turn out rather grey and unappealing. I cooked my cured tongue (boiled for ~2hrs with some vegetables and some herbs until a skewer passed easily into it) and when cooled sufficiently to handle, I peeled the skin from the tongue and then coiled it within the ceramic bowl of the meat press.

If you like a jelly around the tongue (as I do), then you can reduce the cooking liquor and spoon a couple of tablespoons into the ceramic bowl of the Meat Press with the tongue. The meat press comes complete with a rigid plastic disk to be pressed down by the screwplate, the tighter you press making the pressed joint more firm and toothsome (commercially produced luncheon tongue slices ate typically a bit more ‘mushy’ than I like).

The tongue turned out fabulously and was delicious. And one of the biggest satisfactions was that the cost was also much cheaper overall than buying pre-packed sliced meat. Even my young kids thought it “YUMMY mummy” although they didn’t like the look of it in its raw state

The savings

How much cheaper? Well, set aside the initial investment of the Meat Press which will be recovered over a great many years, each slice of tongue was approximately 1/5th of the cost of buying pre-packed.

Once you have used the meat press for something like a tongue, you will think of other uses too that also call for pressing e.g. terrines.

I have to say that this meat press looks great and just a touch retro that will not look out of place even if just used for decorative purposes in a contemporary kitchen.

Our rating? 9/10 … it does exactly what it says, is extremely well constructed and looks great.

Our one negative: we might have liked to have the option to subsitute different shaped (i.e.. rectangular) dishes to use the press with. However it will not take much effort to cannibalise a nylon chopping board to fit an existing dish to press a long terrine to just as good effect.

Tagged as: Cast iron, Cook, Cutting board, Home, Meat, Sandwich, Supermarket, Vegetable