Gyutan | BBQ Beef Tongue
Hi everyone! My name is Nami, and I share quick and easy Japanese home cooking at my blog, Just One Cookbook.
I’m really excited to be here today to celebrate Lori Lynn (LL)’s 5 year anniversary for her blog! Congratulations LL! For the past year I’ve followed her blog and I’ve been continuously inspired by her beautiful and unique creations. Each week I am really excited every time I receive recipe updates from her. Working together in the food blogger community, she is someone special to me because I truly admire her culinary talents and magical photography skills. I feel very honored to be invited by her today for this special series of guest posts she’s having. Thank you LL!
The only request from her for this guest post was that I cook something exotic. For someone who is not familiar with Japanese food, it’s possible to think many dishes in Japanese cuisine can be exotic, such as sashimi (raw fish). Being a Japanese myself, I had to give it some thoughts and I finally came up with one, which might be too exotic for some readers.
I prepared gyutan, which is grilled sliced beef tongue. Until I did a bit of research for this post, I didn’t know that beef tongue is used not only by Japanese cuisine, but enjoyed in many other cuisines such as American, Mexican, Romanian, German, Persian, English, Russian, Italian, Filipino, Korean and many more (source). I was very surprised when I found this out since I don’t typically see beef tongue on restaurant menus (except in Mexican Taquerias).
The Japanese word gyutan is a combination of the Japanese word for cow (gyu) and the English word tongue (tan). The region in Japan that first started to cook gyutan was Sendai and it was initially considered a rather unusual dish, but gradually gained popularity throughout Japan around 1950s.
