Cow Tongue

In my recent trip to Bakersfield I had the privilege to eat at a Noriega Hotel, a Basque style restaurant.  (The Basque people are an ethnic group primarily inhabit an area traditionally known as the Basque Country, a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-eastern Spain and south-western France.)   The experience was truly a unique one.  The meal was served family style in a big hall with rows of long tables.  As with most family style meals there was far too much food and everything was delicious.  The food was all fairly straight forward i.e. the flavors weren't especially spectacular or bold, but they were different from the norm in subtle ways that let you know that you weren't eating traditional American food.  There was however one thing that stood out as a delicacy in this part of the world that I had never had, and that would be... cow tongue.  Pickled cow tongue to be exact (pictured at the left) now this was VERY intimidating to me because, well, it's cow tongue.  I had a tone of other thoughts at the time but, can't really recall them now.  So I'll cut to the finale, it was actually very good.  Tasted a bit like roast beef to be perfectly honest.  The one complaint that I had was that it was pickled, the brine I think gave it a lot of flavor and thus the taste of the tongue was somewhat lost.  I really want to try tongue again in a tacos.  Which I've heard are pretty awesome.