Serve the tendons in the cooking broth. Add fried garlic and scallions to each bowl of beef tendon soup after squeezing a lemon quarter over each serving.
But beef tendon is also notoriously difficult to cook. It requires many hours of simmering to reach the ideal level of tender chewiness. Overcook it and it melts into the cooking liquid. Using a slow cooker simplifies the process.
Cook the tendons only with salt, pepper, garlic, and ginger if you prefer to serve them as a soup. Instead of water, use bone broth.
Note that the long cooking makes the beef tendons shrink. You’ll have roughly half as many tendons as you did when you first placed them in the slow cooker when they are finished. Consider that when deciding just how much you need. I advise going overboard rather than underestimating.
Instant Pot Beef Tendon / Gan Bo
The USDA doesn’t have nutrition data for tendons, but I did a little digging in the scientific literature and found that, by dry weight, tendons are composed of about 85% collagen (mostly type I), 2% elastin and 1-5% proteoglycan (in the full text of this paper). Check out the end of this post for more information about the nutritional benefits of collagen. In short, it’s fantastic for skin, joint, and digestive health.
I didn’t use anything to season the broth. Instead, I was prepared to use a lot of fresh culantro to give the finished soup more flavor. Note that the herbs cilantro and coulantro are distinct and have different uses. Culantro holds up much better to heat and is a staple in many cuisines, including Puerto Rican, where cilantro is typically used fresh as a garnish or in raw condiments like salsas and guacamoles. Although it is much stronger, the flavor is somewhat similar to that of cilantro.
5) Put the lid on the pot and let it simmer for up to 7 hours. Use a pot with a tight-fitting lid to prevent the water from evaporating. Over the course of the day, I didn’t need to add any more water to my enameled cast iron pot. Make periodic checks to make sure there is enough water in the pot and add more as needed. If any new scum forms, skim it off.
I decided to cook the tendon using a prolonged, low simmer on the stove after doing a lot of reading. According to what I read, simmering the tendon for up to 7 hours would produce an incredibly rich broth that is bursting with gelatin and collagen as well as melt-in-your-mouth tender tendon. When eating beef tendon, people get very excited and refer to it as “the new pork belly.” I think it absolutely lives up to that title!.
If you are a fan of the Vietnamese soup Pho, you may have already eaten beef tendon and not known it. Tendon is also a popular dish in China in soups and even as a stand-alone appetizer. Since I am on the autoimmune paleo protocol right now, I couldn’t make most of the recipes I found due to their need for soy sauce and/or seed-based spices (and I’m out of coconut aminos).