So last weekend, I learned that I can get about two pounds of pork kidneys (6 kidneys in total) for $4 at the international market halfway across town. When I saw that, I thought to myself, "Self, we've never eaten kidneys before. They don't cost much. Let's have an adventure!" and I tossed a pack into my buggy. Granted, I had no idea what the fuck to do with them, but that's all part of the fun. I mean, I ate plenty of pig poop chute a couple months ago, so why not eat some piss sieves, too?
Having learned from my mistakes with the chitlins, I did Google how to clean kidneys before I started, and I even did my best to follow instructions before I got bored, closed the site, forgot some steps, skipped others, and just said, "fuck it."
First things first, I peeled off the pieces of membrane still attached. That was easy. I also trimmed off any extra chunks of...whatever-the-fuck that were attached to them.
Next step was cutting the kidney in half to find blood, piss, and other random shit. Luckily for me, the kidneys were still somewhat frozen, so they didn't just empty out all over the place. The smell of urine was pretty strong, so if that causes you trouble, be careful. Having housebroken many dogs, it doesn't bother me much.
I just used my knife to cut around that middle chunk as best I could, then slid the blade underneath to cut it out. Still easy.
I ended up cutting the kidneys up into a few extra pieces, but it was all good. Unfortunately, I forgot the step about scoring the kidneys, so, instead, I just poked a bunch of holes in them with my knife. I figured that was good enough.
I dumped some kosher salt into one of the boxes and some MSG into the second just to experiment a little bit, then added water to cover the meat, put the lids on, and stuck them in the fridge overnight.
After sitting in the salt water overnight, a lot of the blood had cleaned out of the kidney parts. I drained the liquid, then rinsed each piece.
Last step was to boil the pieces for about "30 seconds apiece" according to the instructions. I didn't time it; I just kind of ballparked it and it seemed okay. The important thing they mentioned is that the outside should be gray and it shouldn't be cooked all the way through. Oh, and all that shit you see in the water? That's why you're boiling it. The instructions said "bloodscum" or some shit like that. I don't know, and I don't particularly care.
Since I'm a Memphis boy, I figured the right thing to do would be to bread and fry the little bastards. I chopped up about half of the kosher salt box kidney into bite-size chunks, dredged them in flour (seasoned with salt and pepper), gave them an egg wash, and coated them in bread crumbs (seasoned with black sea salt and cayenne).
I then melted some butter, let it brown just a little bit, added a little olive oil, and fried that shit up nice and crispy.
With the pork removed from my pan, I added in some diced red onion, sliced garlic, and, a few minutes later when the garlic was getting crispy, some red pepper flakes. This is a good start for just about anything, so I knew it would all be okay.
Once the pepper flakes had been able to cook into the oil some, I dumped in a few sliced shiitake mushrooms and some diced red bell pepper. I added a little more butter and a little more olive oil, then let all of that simmer until the mushrooms were starting to get pretty soft (but still with a little firmness; I like bite on my shiitakes).
Last, but not least, I dumped in some chopped kale and sliced tomatoes, turned the heat down, and let that all simmer together with some salt and pepper until my rice was done. Oh, yeah, I didn't mention that I cooked up some white rice in my rice cooker.
Plating was simple enough. I used a bowl (with a little bit of butter in the bottom) to form my rice into a little shape and got that placed in one corner with the butter slowly running down through it. I spooned some of my veggies up against it and out to the opposite corner. I then dropped a few pieces of kidney on either side. I wasn't putting much effort in because it was about 8pm after a day of work and I was hungry.
Overall, it tasted great. The veggies were spectacular, the rice was pretty good, and the kidney was fuckin delicious. Granted, if you bread something and fry it in butter, it's gonna taste pretty damn good. However, the meat itself was really nice. Kind of a less spongy liver, with a taste somewhere between dark chicken meat and a pork chop. Having tried it prepared this way (and with three more batches ready to go), I've got a few ideas for what else to try, so stay tuned.
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