Adventures In Liver Land

[Guest guest]

About a week ago, I got my very first order of never-frozen meat from North

Star Bison*, including a frightening amount of liver, all vacuum-packed and

supposedly good for two to three weeks of delicious eating, or maybe even

four weeks, at least if the presumably cauterized taste buds of some of

their more insensate customers are to be trusted.

In my endless quest for health, I'd been eating some grass-fed beef liver

every now and then, cooked as rare as I could manage, when I heard that

bison liver was milder and less cursed with flavor. The cooked stuff was

giving me acne whenever I actually got up the mustard to eat it, so when

the new bison liver came, looking alarmingly like an IV bag of blood ready

to be transfused into a triple amputee in St. 's emergency room, I

left good taste behind and decided to try it raw.

I cut the first package open, drained off the blood (drinking raw, stale

liver blood would have been one new thing too many; I'm guessing blood

needs to be either ultra-fresh or cooked to be palatable) and dropped a

pound of liver onto a plate. Strangely, it looked exactly like dark red

ocher pigment that had just started to thicken and dry. The liver is sort

of gelatinous, and the membrane on the outside is perfectly smooth and

featureless, so when I poked it with my fork and watched it quiver, the

illusion only intensified.

I decided to start simply, so I cut off a small chunk, popped it in my

mouth and chewed. The taste was, as advertised, much less intense than

that of beef liver. For anyone whose main problem with liver is the strong

flavor, I can wholeheartedly recommend bison liver. It really is very

mild. In fact, I almost didn't notice any liver flavor at all until it had

built up over the course of eating about half a pound, but more on that

later. I'm told lamb liver is also excellent in this regard, and I'll be

trying that in a few weeks.

The first problem I had, predictably enough, was the texture, but it wasn't

exactly the problem I'd expected. The liver wasn't particularly slimy, and

it didn't slither around in my mouth trying to escape either. In fact, I

find the rare inside of lightly-cooked liver to be much, much slimier, and

much mushier too, maybe because it's warm and I was eating this stuff

straight out of the fridge. Raw, cold bison liver was actually a bit

tough, but without any of the fibrous texture of muscle meat or, say,

canvas or thick hemp rope. In fact, it was rather like a really tough

jelly, jelly on steroids that spends its spare time in the gym pumping

iron. I could bite right through it, but it seemed to demand a lot of

chewing, and chewing tough raw membrane-coated liver jelly wasn't fun.

I tried gulping it down without chewing at all, the way some people do raw

oysters, but the problem is that while raw oysters are delicious and I

could easily eat five or six thousand of them at a single sitting if they

were fresh enough, I still have to chew them or I gag and they start coming

back up. Something in my brain simply will not let me swallow without a

certain amount of chewing. What I found out I can do, though, is give a

small chunk of liver a few symbolic bites and then swallow, even though at

that point's it's really not chewed at all, just a bit ragged around the edges.

I ate about a third of a pound that way, and then I ran into the second

problem: the liver flavor is apparently cumulative, and it was starting to

become a problem even though I washed each mouthful down with water (a very

bad habit I hope someday to cure myself of). I tried salting and peppering

a chunk, but this actually made it much harder to get down, so I tried a

little lemon juice, but that was a failure too. Then I tried horseradish,

cayenne sauce, habanero sauce, jerk sauce, creme fraiche, spicy sour cream,

saccharine, mint, oregano, dish soap, household bleach, and at least a

hundred other things, each worse than the last, until finally I went back

to eating it plain, and that worked, right up until the dodgy texture and

the accumulation of liver flavor finally stopped me halfway through the

one-pound package.

Since then, I've eaten a pound over the course of two days, given myself a

day off, rinsed and repeated, and not only have I stayed acne-free, eating

it is actually getting easier as I go along, so I guess my message is " Come

on in, the water's really not that all that horrible! " . At least give it a

try. Cut off a really small chunk and chew it as little as you can without

causing your gorge to rise when you swallow, and you might just find that

it's OK, particularly once you get past your preconceived notions about

what it's going to taste like.

I do have a few questions, though. How much liver is enough? How much is

too much? Am I in danger of iron overload? B vitamin overload? Liver

membrane overload? I'd think any good whole food like liver that's rich in

nutrients and free of antinutrients would help the system maintain

homeostasis relatively easily, but I suppose I could be wrong, particularly

in the case of an unhealthy system like mine.

And how much more than usual is good for a temporary B-vitamin

replenishment drive? I know I'm seriously deficient in a number of B

vitamins, and liver is one of the best sources of almost all of them, so

I'm eating a lot of it at the moment. For awhile I tried synthetic

supplements, but that didn't really work. (We can just put that bit of

foolishness down to B-vitamin deficiency-induced dementia and forget about

it.) Presumably the liver will work a lot better, but how can I tell when

to throttle back a bit on it and move to a maintenance dose?

Any thoughts?

-

*As a post-script, I want to note that while the liver from North Star is

exceptionally fresh and clean, I was a good deal less impressed by their

sirloins and roasts. Those were a bit on the spoiled side. I'm sure North

Star itself isn't at fault, but I am a little confused about how their

processor could turn out ultra-clean liver and somewhat-spoiled muscle

meat. Any enlightenment would be much appreciated.