Weird Crap I Cook: Roast Tuna Head

“So much head I woke up in Sleepy Hollow” – Kanye West

I hear ya Kanye, I hear ya.  Before listening to Dark Fantasy I legitimately had no idea that Kanye West was friends with recreational tuna fishermen, let along had any interest in cooking odd foods.  Shows what I know.  We have so much in common!

Much like Kanye, when I got home from last weekend’s trip to LBI I recognized I had lots of head in my freezer; two from yellowfin tuna plus a hogs head.  I knew I had to cook one of them, and quickly, to make room in the freezer for our upcoming fall beef CSA.  With football Sunday and an apartment full of guinea pigs, er, friends planning to come over, I figured it was time to cook some tuna head.

I ended up thawing the one from earlier in the summer that wasn’t fully cleaned or butchered prior to freezing.  Gotta say, what came out of the trash bags was relatively grim.

Like I said, grim.  This photo is after I cut away the stomach and intestines that had been frozen in with the head.  Don’t worry, I won’t be posting shots of the butchery.  I just wanted to be done with this one before I could stink up the kitchen so did no pausing for pictures in process.  Also, there was still a fish hook in the jaw which added to the horrifying motif

The good news was that there was a bonus strip of belly meat still attached to the head.  The bad news was everything else.  The tuna was freezer burned and generally smelled awful due to the contents of the stomach and intestines being wrapped up with the meat.

At times during the process I considered tossing the whole thing out but instead trimmed away most of the exposed meat and found that underneath was some nice looking pink tuna.  Less meat than if it had been fully cleaned before freezing, but still plenty left to use.  I bagged the collars and belly separate from the head and left them in the fridge overnight.

The next morning I put together a marinade of soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, siracha, and brown sugar.

That giant jug of Kikkoman from Costco has been excellent for a summer full of marinades and sauces.  The full sodium aspect of it just means that I’ve been filling out my friendship anklets better lately

About half of the marinade went in with the collars and belly and the other half went into the trash bag that held the head.  After a couple hours in the marinade the head went into a Pyrex with some of the marinade poured over the top.

If it didn’t smell horrifying, this would be a decent animal head to hang on the wall.  Maybe with a tail on the other side of the wall and possibly a cracked pattern stenciled on the wall.  You know, to show what a wacky homeowner you are

When it comes to roast tuna head, there isn’t a ton of info to be found on the English language internets, so I was basing my approach on a Bizarre Foods episode and knowing that heat + head = edible.  I leaned a lot harder on the second point since there wasn’t any detail on how to cook the head in that episode, just a picture of it coming out of the oven.

With that said, the head went into a preheated 350F oven for about an hour before I checked on it.  It took an incredible amount of restraint not to say “the head headed into a preheated…” in the previous sentence.  I’m addicted to puns like some sort of non-life-destroying, mildly humorous version of crack.  Crack jokes!

After an hour, I didn’t expect it to look any different.  But, I was incorrect with that assumption.

All the skin and bone had this smelling pretty fishyfunky, which is why I had a sturdy chili cooking alongside it in ‘Lil Blue.  This made it extra confusing for every person that stepped into the kitchen and caught a whiff

Shortly after taking that picture, the head tipped over, I poured the rest of the marinade on, and it went back into the oven.

Poor ‘Lil Blue.  It must have been so scary being in that oven alone with the tuna head.  At this point I think her friends are talking to her at parties about how I’m no good for her

After another half hour the head looked fully cooked through so I removed it from the oven and let it cool down a bit for handling.

The head felt like a kettle cooked potato chip at this point; far more brittle than I thought it would be.  Generally this whole experience was pretty enlightening.  Really just for me though

After 30-40 minutes, I called Buschy in for this portion of the documentation since it would be impossible to do myself.  It was really odd to me how easily the head cracked apart, but it made it much easier to scavenge for meat inside the head.

Opened it like a book.  I learned this destructive technique from Janet who loves books but treats every one of them like it’s a perfectly cooked rack of ribs ready to be torn apart and eaten.  Or, like she is also a book but she is a fierce cannibal.  Lets go with the first analogy, far less clumsy and uncomfortable

No need to share a ton of fotos from the mining.  The cheeks of a tuna are relatively small but can be fished out from between the inner and outer head cartilage.  The bulk of the meat is between the top of the skull and the skin and came off in a giant pile.  Aside from pulling some bits of meat from around the eyes, that was pretty much the whole pile.

Those eyes have to have any regular blog reader a little concerned about what will be coming later in the blog

After picking out some small and large bones, discarding any pieces that got a little too charred in the base of the pan, and chopping the meat coarsely, I had a nice little pile to work with.

Ended up adding the grilled belly meat to this bowl as well.  With the relatively innocuous look of the meat I wish multiple guests hadn’t stumbled into the kitchen earlier in the day while the oven was open and mumbled “holy f*ck” before hustling out of the room

With the meat in the oven to keep warm, I grilled up the collars as an appetizer and an easy entry point into tuna head eating.  Or that’s how I pictured it.

Due to the amount of trimming and the fish being 1/3 smaller than the one we caught last weekend, these collars felt a little wimpy.  Didn’t help that we threw away all of our take out chopsticks recently so people had to use forks to pick at it

The reality was actually a little different since random bites were fishier than the rest and, because I had trimmed so much off, the best meat had to be mined for.  Everyone picked a bit and I added the remainder to the meat bowl.

Just realized I haven’t addressed my plan for the tuna head meat yet.  I guess I was hoping Blog Villain Matt wouldn’t still be reading.  I made tacos.  There, I said it.

Flour tortillas were the only normal part of these tacos though, the other toppings were cubed cucumber, chopped green onion, and a slaw made of green cabbage, homemade pickled carrots, and rice wine vinegar.

Forgot to take this picture before we all made our tocks.  I need to make something soon that Kristi isn’t terrified to hang out in the kitchen with.  The pictures on this blog have been an abomination lately

A good taco featured all of the ingredients plus the tuna topped with a thick sauce made from duck sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, siracha, ginger, and brown sugar.

I could have sipped that sauce in front of a fire and had a wonderful evening.  Also, I’ve come around on these fake paper plates Kristi got for when we host people, but I hate that I think friends are going to poison themselves when they microwave them

Gotta say, these tocks were pretty solid.

The tuna meat, since it was fully cooked through, was relatively firm but not nearly as fishy as I expected from the smell when disassembling the head.  The sauce added a nice strong flavor that didn’t overwhelm the fish but made up for the bland cucumber that added texture but not much else.  Lastly, the combo of the crunchy slaw and scallion gave a nice contrast to the head meat.  Lots of Asian flavors coming together and playing nice.  I will likely end up doing something similar with the other tuna head in the freezer.

I didn’t forget the eyes.

Lets talk about something else

I also didn’t eat them.  Next time, I promise. Let me do this on my own terms, k?

We might have our first guest blogger next week, which will be exciting and likely ego testing for me.  Hope you enjoy the new nauseating blog masthead that could be tweaked soon.

Weird Crap I Cook: Ponce

I’m not sure whether this is a good thing, but unlike the usual 72 hours from “that sounds interesting” to research & cooking, I planned to cook this meal a few weeks in advance.  The logic actually worked backwards: I had to be in NYC for a fantasy baseball draft Sunday, so we decided to hang in NJ with Tim’s smoker (and some people) Saturday, and THEN I found something to cook at the grocery store.  Good old fashioned pork maws.

“Maw is a much more appealing term than stomach!” – savvy pork advertiser.  These were coming out of the butcher’s area chopped in half and I had to ask for a whole one.  I got my usual perplexed look from the folks in white coats

I’d recently seen the Bizarre Foods New Orleans episode that showed a sausage stuffed hog stomach that was smoked, braised and carved like a roast.  Sign me up!  It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the stomach and after finding minimal documentation online for how to make it at home, I was hooked on the idea of making it.

After purchase, the stomach spent a couple months in a vacuum sealed bag in the freezer before heading into a cooler with a half pork shoulder for the drive to NJ.  Plan was to wake up Saturday, grind up the shoulder with garlic and onions, mix in some spices, prep the stomach, stuff it, and cook it.  At least that’s how I thought of it; I clearly didn’t understand how big a step “prep the stomach” would be.

A big welcome to the newest blog villain, Tim’s awful digital camera!  That knife was participating in it’s second grossest food preparation after previously cutting off the finger tip of Hub Hollow lead singer, and benefactor of Janet’s awesome wardrobe, Jill.  I guess that wasn’t really food preparation, just way too much knife for a soft brie and tiny Greek woman

From there the meat, garlic, and onions were cut into cubes and, with Tim’s instruction (he helped too much this time to earn his usual mean spirited remarks) headed into the grinder.  We used the handy meat grinder attachment for his new Kitchenaid mixer, an item I’ve also owned for a few years but have been too scared to use.

I did half the meat coarse grind and half fine grind.  My guess is I exclusively use the coarse grind moving forward since it’s a little more what you expect from sausage and ground meat in general

Once the meat, onion and garlic were all ground together, we stirred in a lot of salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and paprika along with some chopped arugala from Tim’s garden.

Probably between 3 and 4 pounds of sausage.  The arugala was a last second call when I realized there needed to be some contrasting herb flavor that was missing from the current mix.  Plus, I will put arugala in anything if given the opportunity

To test for flavor I pulled a bit out of the bowl and fried it in a pan.  It was pretty freaking tasty, but I added a little more seasoning to be safe.

Welp, with all those pleasantries out of the way, let’s get down to the main event and check out that stomach!

There she is!  Note the whitish area on the top right that must be where they cut an opening to empty the contents and clean the inside of the stomach thoroughly. It was a lot larger than it looked in the package

I’m not sure if it was feeling inadequate surrounded by such enormous stomachs and increased in size overnight, but this hog maw was way bigger than expected.  Since the goal with ponce is to have the meat tightly packed into the stomach, I needed to make sure that it wasn’t going to be too big for the sausage we’d made.  First step was stitching closed that large cut used to clean the stomach.

What to stitch with was definitely a hot topic at the Tim Ryan household for a solid hour, but we ended up going with whatever Kristi could find on her usual morning coffee/hog-stomach-stitching-material run.  The final materials ended up being a standard thick sewing needle and some unflavored dental floss.

I felt like a field medic or a fugitive from the law who needs to do some quick triage in order to keep on his quest to clear his name.  Neither of those analogies pressure tests too well since I was probably in pajamas, toasty warm, and full from a nice breakfast

After finishing the stitch on the large cut, I found the other entry point to the stomach (yes, there are two of course) and attached it to Tim’s faucet.  The questions I wanted to answer were how watertight the stitching was and how large it got when fully inflated.  And the answers were, “holy MOLY!!!”

This wasn’t even close to fully inflated but it was huge.  It looked like the hot air balloon that the most annoying character in movie history built in Waterworld.  Anyone who has seen that movie just slapped their head in an, “Ohhh! Thank god he told me what that reminded me of, that was going to keep me up at night!” reaction

It was immediately obvious that the stomach was too large for the amount of sausage we’d made.  So, using the same lethal paring knife, I made an unscientific judgement on where to cut, and stitched it up all over again.  This go-round was 10x more infuriating since the outside was getting greasy as it warmed up and my fingers were full of holes from errant stitching.  Meals like this are less a labor of love than a labor of stupidity.

Much more manageable, and yes, it did make me reconsider stomach stapling as a good fallback if I can’t get in shape on my own at some point.  The new fallback is that Olestra stuff, seems like a total no-brainer

With the stomach prepped, a quick change in attachments turned the Kitchenaid from a meat grinder to a sausage stuffer.  Albeit a somewhat frustrating one that made sounds like a boot stuck in mud.

I kept asking Tim if he wanted to switch roles and be the stomach holder but he kept saying, “nah, I’m good”.  Weirdo

After a lot of shifting the meat inside the casing and moving the spout around to continue stretching the stomach, we finally got all of the sausage in.  Quick stitch on the opening, and we were ready to go.

The stitched side made it oddly resemble some sort of stuffed animal, which it kinda was, but not the type I’d let Janet play with

Well, I was glad the grossest part was over, though it really wasn’t too bad while we were in process since there were no funky smells.  At one point the fully inflated ponce slipped out of my hands and slowly wandered across the counter away from me, moving further away with each botched grab.  Offered a good mix of angered frustration and laughing hysterically at my own stupidity.

After a quick rub with some salt, pepper, and paprika the stomach joined the four racks of ribs that Tim had cooking in the smoker.

Godspeed, little doodle.  Always hard to know you are shutting the door for a few hours with no peaking allowed, but I’ve become pretty good at it.  Janet hiding her face in every ultrasound for 6 straight months taught me that one

While that smoked, Kristi and I visited John and Julie’s place to find them in the midst of planting 36 trees around the property with the rusty backhoe that John bought on Craigslist and fixed up.  While it was amazing how much they were getting done, let’s just say that we choose to spend our weekends a little differently.

My guess is she is slightly more competent than her father behind the wheel of this thing

Back at the other Ryan ranch, two hours into the four hour smoke, I found Tim pacing outside the smoker anxiously waiting to open it.  For someone who preaches the patience of good BBQ cooking, he was remarkably antsy.

This was after we flipped the ponce.  We could see liquid bubbling inside the ponce and I couldn’t believe the stitching was holding without leaking.  Second proudest I have been of my sewing after the work I did to keep together the awful vendor sample backpack I used throughout Europe.  That thing consisted entirely of paperclips, duct tape, and hotel sewing kits by the end of my two month trip

The lid went back down for another two hours of smoking in the 200F-225F range (total of just over four hours), before we finally had this:

Starting to look more like a large kielbasa or sausage, right?  Mildly intriguing at least?

From there the ponce headed into a beer braise.  Well, not actually a beer braise, but a braise in the six pack of Odouls Amber that Tim had been trying to find a use for since our baby shower last May.  Ended up working out pretty well since I would have hated wasting 6 dark beers on this.

Threw the bone from the pork shoulder in the braise along with some crushed cloves of garlic.  As usual, this was all guesswork, but at least my excuse this time was a complete lack of documentation online instead of a pseudo-manly disdain for outside advice

The lid went on and the ponce braised for about 2 hours in a 300F oven.  Despite not having a recipe to work with, I knew it should have braised for longer than that, but there was a mass of toddlers and the adults responsible for said toddlers arriving at the house.

At first they were tided over with a smorgasbord of kielbasa and Italian sausage along with some chicken liver crostini from Tim (just in case you needed a reminder of how much Ryans love liver).  But, eventually we had to feed everyone dinner and that’s how the ponce ended up on the cutting board, even if we didn’t expect anyone to eat it.

It was around this point that we realized Tim’s camera would only take an in-focus shot with a flash and a perfectly steady hand. Tim’s Camera, like a Terminator sent from the future to infuriate me on a day when it’s owner decided to be helpful for once.  Friggin’ jerk camera, I’ll show him

While the ponce rested, I (over)cooked some white rice in chicken stock and reduced the braising liquid on the stovetop.  Once it had reduced by half, I whisked in a couple tablespoons of roux to thicken it and we had a nice dark gravy to go with the ponce and rice.  Speaking of the ponce, here’s some action shots of the carving from our crew of queasy photographers.

Looked about how I wanted from a texture perspective, but I wanted some more pink color from the smoke.  Just looked less like smoked sausage than I had hoped it would

Still smiling the same way when photographed cooking.  Note Tim’s pointing gesture to disown the meal in photo documented form

There were no funky smells, just smoked meat and what looked like a pork meatloaf.  I was excited to try it, I just didn’t know who else would be.  To my surprise, some friends started serving themselves slices of ponce so I made myself a plate and went to hide so I wouldn’t have to look anyone in the eye.

Collard greens-style kale from Tim’s garden, Erin’s slaw, Tim’s Greek ribs and the ponce/rice/gravy.  Pretty dece plate actually, the ponce looked totally innocuous when separated from it’s original context

The ponce was interesting.  It had far less flavor than I expected based on the piece of sausage that we test fried earlier in the day.  The sausage was moist and had the consistency of meat loaf without any odd flavors coming in from the stomach, which basically acted as a gigantic sausage casing.  The stomach itself could have used a couple more hours of braising since it was pretty chewy.

I was a little bummed out since I wanted a super dense sausage with lots of smokiness, but the gravy added some smoke and beer flavors and the rice was a solid bed for the meat.  OK first run overall, but I need to put some time into improving my sausage making ability back in JP.  As usual, Tim’s ribs and Erin’s slaw were both awesome.

The most surprising part was that most of the ponce ended up eaten (or partially eaten).  I think the idea of it sounds a lot grosser than the actual final presentation, but generally I feel that way about most things I make.  Thanks to the Tim for the hospitality and the Peapack/Far Hills/B’ville crew for their tolerance of my endeavor.  Next week will either be more or less gross, I promise.