My New Favorite Way to Eat Organ Meats

Getting organ meats in isn't easy for most of us who didn't grow up eating them. I honestly have never liked the taste of liver, yet I consistently feel better when I eat it, so I try to eat it consistently.

My difficulty finding a way to eat liver that I truly loved can be seen in the title of an article I wrote back in May of 2013, How to Cook Liver and Make It Taste Not-Bad. I couldn't bring myself to write an article about how to make it taste good.

A few years ago, however, I was at a Weston A Price Conference where tacos were served for lunch. The tacos were delicious. Only after I finished lunch did I find out they were 25% organ meats, with the majority of that being liver, and I was shocked because I couldn't tell at all.

The secret then? Mix them into ground beef and heavily season them with taco seasoning.

Over the past six months I have perfected, for my purposes at least, an exceedingly simple organ meat taco recipe that I consider to be the best way of eating liver I've ever experienced. I feel comfortable saying this tastes good.

I start with White Oak Pastures paleo ground beef. This is 60% organ meats, 40% beef, all ground together. It's 20% liver, 20% heart, 10% spleen, 10% kidney. I also start with a packet of Simply Organic Taco Seasoning.

I coat a pan with a very thin layer of any oil that is fairly low in polyunsaturated fat and has a high enough smoke point to use on the stove top. I break the paleo ground beef into crumbles in the pan, and dump the entire packet of taco seasoning into it, and then add a hefty splash of salt. I cook it until the crumbles are browned on all sides.

Now, you can use this for taco meat if you have time to cook up all the other ingredients of the tacos. But I personally put it into a glass storage dish in my refrigerator, and take out a big scoop each morning for breakfast, often mixing it with rice, butter, and nutritional yeast. I'm generally too busy to make tacos every time I eat this, although putting taco-flavored meat into a taco shell with other taco ingredients would obviously be the premium way to enjoy taco-flavored meat.

For me, the significance of this is simply that I find this to taste far better than any other way of eating organ meats I've tried.

White Oak is low-histamine, grass-fed, zero-waste, negative-carbon-footprint meat, with an impressive dedication to animal welfare and ecology, and a slaughter-on-site system that allows for maximum freshness.

If White Oak paleo ground beef is sold out, you can use North Star Bison Bison Ground Blend, which is 12.5% liver and 12.5% heart, or US Wellness Ground Beef With Liver Heart and Kidney, which is 10% liver, 40% heart, and 10% kidney.

If you have a meat grinder, you could also make these blends yourself, though I personally don't have time to do that amount of food prep.

Additionally, if you buy your meat from local butchers, you could ask them to make a custom blend for you.

For those who still can't stand eating organs even with an amazing method like this, there are some excellent supplements containing a blend of organ meats. My favorites are Ancestral Grass-Fed Beef Organs and Paleovalley Grass-Fed Organ Complex.

If you join the CMJ Masterpass program, I give you back my affiliate commissions on these products as rebates. The savings are as follows:

• 15% back on White Oak Pastures products as a rebate.

• 8% back on North Star Bison as a rebate,

• 8% back on US Wellness as a rebate, plus a 15% immediate discount on the first two orders, which sums to 23% savings on the first two orders.

• 23.5% off all Ancestral supplements, 15% as an immediate discount and the remainder as a rebate.

• 59.5% off the Paleovalley organ complex, 10% as an immediate discount, and 49.5% as a rebate.

These aren't special offers. These are permanent, completely evergreen savings. I make no money on the sale and instead give what I would have made back to you in exchange for the membership fee. If you sign up today with this link, you can use the code TACO10 to save 10% on the membership fee for life.

Back to the taco meat.

My suspicion is the grinding and blending plays an important role in making this taste good. Since ground beef is the majority meat, it becomes organ-flavored ground beef, where the organ flavor is simply an influence on the overall flavor, as if it is a spice that is added. If you add ten times worth the flavor of taco seasoning, it drowns out the “organ spice.” That's quite different than adding taco seasoning to fresh liver, where instead of having organ-flavored but much more strongly taco-flavored ground beef, you have taco-flavored liver. I also think the fact that it is ground lights off an association in my brain that says “this is taco meat” whereas chopped liver would light off the “this is liver” association in my brain. Put it in a taco shell for the premium version, and you harness all the associations you make with tacos as well.

So, this technique seems a bit more sophisticated than simply covering up the flavor of the organs. Sight, texture, and flavor all combine to evince the sense that this is taco meat, and tastes great, as taco meat is known to do.