Stinky Tripe
Following our prior success cooking offal, David and I decided to try cooking tripe (cow’s stomach). My previous tripe experiences have been limited to Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants and I had never seen it prepared at home. I am sure now that if I had, we would never have attempted our delectable sounding (to me anyways) Sri Lankan tripe curry. Tripe is the stinkiest motherfucker in the world!!!!!! I almost died when David took the tripe out to give it the initial washing — actually we both had to run out of the room gagging. It smelled like an entire herd of cows walked into our kitchen and had explosive diarrhea, died, and then started rotting immediately. No exaggeration. We tried really hard not to lose our appetites through the various stages of cleaning, scrubbing with kosher salt and lime juice, soaking, rinsing, blanching. The smell does not go away. In fact hours into cooking you could kinda smell rotten eggs mingling in with the coconut milk and curry scents. After braising the tripe for a couple hours, it occurred to me that it was no longer a horrible experiment — I was supposed to eat it. Honestly, I don’t know how much of it was the fact that I had been there for the whole preparation, or the fact you could still faintly detect the stench, or the fact that the recipe just wasn’t tasty but it was totally inedible. Absolute disaster meal. So we went out for tacos — Yum!
Not wanting to throw all of our hard work in the garbage, David actually managed to eat some of the curry the next day for lunch. After letting it simmer on the stove for another hour or so and adding some more seasoning, David said it tasted alright and the tripe developed that nice gelatinous texture we are used to in dishes like Pho.
- Mantrakid - "The Secret Song"
Sounds like the stomach may have been old. .I know my Mom stuffed pig’s stomach and probably your Baba did too. Little was wasted on the farm although my Mom did not use a lot of the parts of the animal, i.e. brain, triple, etc.. The pig stomach was stuffed with ground meat mixture of pork and Oatmeal then sewn up. I goggled stuffed pig stomach and can say that the recipes do not stress the amount of washing and care that went into preparing the stomach for the filling. I remember being fascinated by it as a kid as she would wash the stomach and rinse++++ and also scrap the inside, and then the stomach was ready for the filling. (the same care went into preparing casing for sausages) The stuffed stomach was then placed into a crock and weight was placed on top of it for over night. I can’t remember if it was placed in brine, it may have been. The results were delicious. Apparently it is a Pennsylvania Dutch dish and I have seen Italian recipe. I enjoy reading your Blogs,, How about stuffed beef heart for valentines!!!
From what we’ve researched, it sounds like cow stomach is usually pretty stinky. Apparently a lot of people cook it outdoors and I just underestimated how bad it truly could smell! Maybe pig stomachs aren’t so bad? I have heard that its quite common to soak stomachs in some kind of lye mixture so perhaps that was what your Mom was doing.
Yes, I have heard you can use Lye to clean membrane, but given my Mom and Lye when she was making soap from scratch, she would not have allowed us near that stomach if she was using Lye. Lye is very a corrosive substance and she was very carefully in using it. I will find out from Aunty Florence as she would certainly know.
You should really try to make Menudo with the tripe. It is a Mexican soup it is really good. I think you should give it another try because I feel the way you two went about wasn’t the right way lol. I love watching your vids the dishes you try most Mexicans would eat. Some people wouldn’t dare try it lol. I hope ya’ll do try to give the tripe another try.
Also the smell is always there when you first cook it but as you progress in the soup it goes away just open some windows and will be good lol.
We have eaten lots of Menudo and enjoyed it! I also really like trip in Pho so we will definitely give tripe another shot at some point. I think our main issue is that instead of using the much more palatable honeycomb tripe, we used some other stomach section that was quite a bit tougher and stinkier.
Wow I used to cook tripe a lot many years ago and don’t recall this problem. The tripe I can get at the city market here is pretty pristine. Perhaps it’s the cleaning method they use in your area.
I’m from Texas and back home we eat at lot of Menudo. I haven’t had it in a while though, yeah good luck finding in it Florida! But, when my mom used to make it she would soak the tripe in water and vinegar for an hour before cooking it, that helped with the smell. I know for a fact that Tripe is always stinky!
Hi, I just saw your post on Sri Lankan Tripe. I first must say that this is NOT a typical dish you can order at any resteraunt in Colombo or anywhere in Sri Lanka. It is not a traditional Sri Lankan dish. It’s actually a Malay speciality and delicacy. Us…the Malays (you can Wickepidia it …) brought this dish to SL way back when we made SL our new home would usually eat it cooked in a THICK coconut curry base and eaten with something called ‘Munni Pittu’ a dish made with steam flour and put in a bamboo and steamed to firm up and cook. It’s absolutely delicious when made properly and with TONS of yummy spices. yes it must be cleaned well and seasoned..however now Tripe (honey comb or the other kind) can be bought at any local grocery that has been well cleaned and washed..so just cut season and COOK! if you need a recipe let me know
YOU HAVE To make it Malay style to really enjoy the dish. It’s worth it!
Tripe needs to be soaked in water with cal (lime dust) overnight. That does a pretty good job of killing the smell…Heck, I am Mexican and wouldn’t be able to stomach it any other way
!
We still haven’t gotten enough courage to give tripe another shot…but we do enjoy it when others prepare it so maybe with all these great suggestions we can give it another chance soon!
tripe as like any other meats should`nt have any strong smell at all. any clean meat should smell like almost nothing. beeef is one of the most likely to have a smell. not rancid but meaty and blood`ish. chicken should smell clean as sometime ill poke the package i am going to buy before i go to the check out. (after all im going to buy it anyhow ….right)
Haha sorry but you are wrong. Tripe is not like other meats in terms of being odor-free when fresh. Fresh untreated “green tripe” is even funkier and not even fit for humans to eat and is instead used for things like dog food. For tripe to even be sold in grocery stores in America, the USDA requires the tripe be cleaned by bleaching or a similarly acceptable cleaning agent (which itself can contribute other unpleasant odors). Along with bacteria and other things, there is also a mucusal lining of the stomach that contributes to the foul smell; this lining is processed off of the tripe in varying degrees depending on which part of the stomach you’re eating. There are four parts to a cow stomach, so obviously not all tripe tastes/smells the same. Honeycomb Tripe (the reticulum) is the most popular and is stripped entirely of the mucusal lining and from our experience is the least stinky of the tripes. However, what we purchased in this video was Blanket Tripe (the rumen) which is extra smelly because it is the part of the stomach where bacteria breaks things down. No matter the initial cleaning process, tripe can almost always be cleaned further, so pretty much all tripe recipes still call for you to boil and clean it a little more as part of the prep.
You need to make trip curry, fry onions until brown add garlic and curry powder then 1 pot spoon of water, stir.when that water has evaporated add the tripe,stir,add salt,after all that tripe water gone add water enough to boil for 1 hr, after 1hr bite it to test if its soft enough for you,cook more if now or leave the lid halfway open,let all that water evaporate and then the tripe starts to fry,take it off before it starts to stick.
tbh this is the only way i can stand tripe,when there s not alot of liquid around and they curry masks the rankish smell I eat it with rice and a scotch bonnet pepper
LMAO that was the funniest thing I’ve read in a while!! I’ve never eaten it, (although a lot of Italians do)… and I make sure I totally ignore it in the grocery store where I shop.
Thanks for the heads up!