Offal

Offal, otherwise known as organ meats. People have really mixed feelings about these. You might know someone who eats liver, or perhaps the occasional chicken gizzard. When I was younger I always liked food, but organ meats were strange, and gross. I became exposed to cooking with them through working in restaurants while I was going to business school. Slowly but surely, I began to have a paradigm shift. I began to understand why people eat these things.

I began to understand that eating organ meats was historically a necessity, and sometimes even a luxury. In older times, animals were seasonally harvested, every single part of it was used, and nothing was wasted. Contrastingly, Foie gras is one of the most expensive products I have ever cooked with, it is typically the fattened liver of ducks or geese, although the ancient Romans crafted foie from many animals, such as pigs.

In all seriousness though, I don’t sit at home and eat brains all the time, I reserve most offal for special occasions, and for people that I know will appreciate them. Nowadays people have a great fear of organs in mainstream cuisine, although it seems to be getting better slowly. One thing I know truly though, is that taking a piece of food many would throw away and call trash, and using it to create something delicious is profound. Its almost like a sort of culinary alchemy, turning scrap metal into gold.