Uncle Wayne’s Infamous Gizzard Recipe

Family get togethers centered around food.  Every family member has a signature dish and my Uncle Wayne’s dish is gizzards.  Our family fought for the gizzards when we had chicken.  I knew families who threw away these fabulous morsels!  Unbelievable.   But Uncle Wayne’s recipe was INCREDIBLE.

Uncle Wayne would show up with a dutch oven or crock pot full of gizzards and there was a line to get to them.  My father would watch for Wayne’s arrival and if he was first to the dish – he would stand guard – fork in hand, to stab anyone who tried to get some.  As my father “managed” through rigorous radiation on his brain tumor, my uncle arrived with a dutch oven full of gizzards one day JUST FOR ED.   My father called me to let me know that he’d gotten a visit and received gizzards from Uncle Wayne that he didn’t have to share with anyone.  I could hear the gleam in his voice. The next time Uncle Wayne made gizzards it was over a year later and he called Mom and me to share them with him – we thought of Dad through that wonderful meal.

Love those gizzards

Today, Uncle Wayne blessed me by spending the day with me showing me how he made these outstanding treats that we would fight over.  This is not a quick recipe, it takes time to do, but it is well worth it.

Ingredients

• 5 lbs gizzards
• 2 large onions
• 1 lb bacon
• Flour
• 32 oz beef broth
• Olive Oil
• Tones Lemon Pepper (we’ve tried others, this is the one that tastes best)
• Black Pepper
• Salt

You will need a cast iron skillet to fry the gizzards and dutch oven with a lid.

Cook up 1lb of bacon until crispy.  The way we do this is on a broiler pan in the oven on high broil.  You don’t want a lot of bacon grease added to the recipe, you only want the wonderful bacon flavor.  Broil the bacon until crisp then pat grease off and break up into small bite size pieces.

Chop up onions into small bite size pieces.  You should end up with about 3 cups of chopped onions.

Clean both sinks well, in one sink wash the gizzards.   Once they are rinsed off, drain them and use paper towels to try them (you don’t want these soaking wet when you flour them).   In the other sink, dry it off and set a large bowl next to it to put the floured gizzards into.  Put a few cups of floor in the dry sink (this is a great way to dredge meat, keeps your flour mess down to a minimum).  Begin taking handfuls of gizzards and dredging them in the flour until they are lightly coated.  Put these in the bowl until you have all 5lbs floured.

Put a small amount of oil in the bottom of the skillet.  Put just enough gizzards in the skillet to cover the pan.  Lightly sprinkle lemon pepper, pepper, and salt over the gizzards.  Brown them on one side, then flip them over and brown the other side.  When you flip them, take a small handful of onions and sprinkle in around the gizzards just to cook them lightly.  Once the gizzards are browned, put the contents from the skillet in the dutch oven.  Over this layer of gizzards in the dutch oven, sprinkle a small handful of bacon.  Repeat this until you have browned all 5lbs of the gizzards.

Uncle Wayne cooking gizzards on the grill

Pour beef broth into the dutch oven and put the lid on.  Put in the oven at 350 for 2 hours.  You can tell when they are done because the gristle will be VERY tender.

As an experiment today we tried doing this on the grill, kept the grease mess out of the kitchen and it was a wonderful way to keep the gizzards warm and cooking as we were frying up the small batches.  In order to keep them from drying out we added beef broth to the dutch oven as we were going.

You can heat up leftovers in the microwave, but they are really yummy if you pan fry them.  They freeze very well also if you have more than you can eat at one setting.