Beef Heart Skewers
Anticuchos, more or less. Trimmed heart takes a marinade well and cooks in about four minutes.
Heart cubes, a sharp marinade, and a very hot fire. The trimming is covered in how to cook beef heart and it is most of the work.
| 1.5 lb Beef Heart | 1 trim hard, cube 1 inch | 2 marinate 2 hr, no longer | 3 thread and grill, 2 min a side |
| 3 cloves garlic, minced | 4 whisk together | ||
| 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar | |||
| 1 Tbsp smoked paprika | |||
| 1 tsp cumin | |||
| 3 Tbsp olive oil | |||
| 2 tsp coarse salt | |||
| 5Two hours of marinade is plenty. The vinegar starts breaking the surface down past that. | |||
| 6Pull them at medium rare. Heart has no fat to cover an extra minute. | |||
Numbers show the order to work in. Each cell spans exactly the ingredients it uses.
Why two hours and not overnight
The vinegar does useful work on the surface for a couple of hours and then starts turning it chalky. Heart is already tender once trimmed, so the marinade is there for flavor rather than tenderizing, and it does not need all night.
“Patience is a deficiency of mine. Patience is something that my dad models really well. And I think he got that from my grandmother who had it in spades.”
Gray Shipley
Hot fire, short time
Two minutes a side over properly hot coals. You want char on the outside and pink in the middle. Heart is extremely lean, and past medium rare it tightens and takes on the mineral edge people blame on the cut rather than the cook.
“And, so, yeah, I think we're seeing people paying attention to all of the different cuts and using all animal cooking with tallow is kind of a hot trend right now. So 10 years ago, I was trying to talk to anybody who would listen and, oh everybody wants to do it now.”
Gray Shipley
“So yeah, hard is good. And hard work on the farm is something that you don't really need to get separated from. There's some real benefit from it in a lot of ways.”
Gray Shipley
Chimichurri is the natural thing to put on these: see the chimichurri recipe.
How do I make beef heart skewers?
Cube trimmed heart, marinate it briefly, and grill it hot and fast.
- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
- Grilling and Food Safety, USDA FSIS
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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