What to Look For

• When buying a beef heart to use for cooking, use your senses to choose the right one. A raw beef should be deep red in color and look moist on the surface. If a beef heart is a weird color or looks dry, don’t buy it. The surface should also look tight and void of any wrinkles. Tight skin is a good indication that the heart is healthy. A beef heart will smell iron-like, similar to the aroma of a liver. If the beef heart smells rotten or like sulfur, walk away. If you have any questions, ask a butcher.

Preparation for Cooking

• Beef hearts are 100 percent edible, but a few parts are too tough to chew. Those parts should be removed before cooking. Use kitchen shears or a sharp chef’s knife to remove the coarse fibers at the top of the heart. They are edible but very tough and hard to chew. A few veins are found near the top, on the inside of the heart. Use the tip of a chef’s knife to cut underneath the veins. Once you cut the veins away from the muscle, pull them out of the heart with your fingers. Now you're ready to cook.

Culinary Applications

• Because beef hearts are tough and very lean -- low in fat -- they should be cooked using the “low and slow” method. Cook beef hearts in low temperatures for a long period. The two most common cooking methods to cook beef heart are braising and simmering; both involve cooking the beef heart in liquid. The liquid can be anything from water to beef stock to wine. The iron-like taste of beef heart pairs well with red wine that has strong fruity and chocolate tones. Cooked beef hearts are often chopped into bits or ground and used in sausage and meatloaf. Beef heart is sometimes pureed into a paste, mixed with herbs and spices, and poured into a terrine, which is a mold. The terrine is then cooked until the meat mixture solidifies. Once cooked, the meat mixture is cooled and either sliced into wedges or used as a spread for sandwiches and crackers. Beef hearts are also used as an ingredient in pet food.

Biological Function

• The heart is a muscle that pumps blood throughout an animal’s body. Blood must be continuously sent through the circulatory system in order for an animal to survive; it carries oxygen and other important nutrients to the body. A cow heart is much like a human’s. It's much larger in size, but the biological function is the same. The heart is a muscle that involuntarily contracts. The contractions of the heart pump blood through the body. Blood enters through the right atrium. When it enters the right atrium, blood is deprived of oxygen, as the cow’s body has extracted it. Blood exits through the right ventricle and is sent through the lungs, where oxygen is added to the blood. It enters the heart again through the left atrium and exits through the left ventricle, where it then flows through the cow’s circulatory system.