From Snout to Tail

By Virginia Prescott on Wednesday, August 5, 2009.

Dinner at a typical upscale restaurant might include a tenderloin steak or plank-grilled salmon. Lamb heart, pig tails and head cheese? Maybe not.

But offering entrails and internal organs is at the heart of some high-end kitchens. Known as offal, as in what falls off a butchered animal, these variety meats have come back into vogue as people approach food more holistically.

Helped along by chef Fergus Henderson’s book The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, now chef Chris Cosentino of San Francisco’s Incanto is holding up the banner. With a new television show and a cookbook in the works, he’s hoping to put offal back on the American menu.

Chris Cosentino's website

Chris Cosentino's recipes for offal

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It's good to see this cuisine get some well-deserved attention.

Sick. I think if some celebrity made commercials to promote the consumption of manure, many Americans would eat it.After all, how else did Americans learn to eat in ways that makes us as sick andfat as so many are?
This is so disgusting...

Sorry, Beth, but offal meats have some of the leanest and most nutrient cuts of meat. Liver has high amounts of iron. Heart is about the leanest "steak" you can find. Us Americans cast aside theses cuts when pre-packaged supermarket steaks came to be. We spoil ourselves and waste tasty and nutritious parts of animals who give their lives so we can sustain ours.

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