My favorite foods are often ones which dot the front of your shirt in ruddy brown or red and when cooled in a deli container become a block of gelatinized broth. Think pozole, pho, tonkotsu, backbone stew and menudo. One of the bonuses of living near a vibrant Mexican community is weekend menudo. A soup requiring too much effort to make on weekdays is a treat best saved for Saturday and Sunday, sometimes solely Sunday.
Menudo is tripe soup. Tripe is really divisive, even among the open-minded. My wife, who lived in South America where she was treated with bowls of mondongo regularly, avoids tripe like the plague. According to her, she has reached her tripe quota. My experiences with tripe have been limited to Sunday bowls of menudo and trippa alla romana – in all cases made away from where I stood or sat. I had it lucky in that regard and removed a great barrier to liking tripe. I also am allowed to choose when I want to eat it, removing another barrier.
Cooking tripe, as noted above, is a labor intensive process requiring scrubbing numerous times, blanching, and boiling. Now boiling, and even blanching, are not physically intensive processes, but understand the smell, “barnyard” is a really nice way to describe it, is intense. The smell is intense enough to be concerned about how well the tripe was rinsed and if I should have blanched it a few more times. It is concerning up until the chilis are added along with the cumin and the kitchen goes back to smelling a bit more like food than pasture.
One lament. There is no local tripe to be found. I found mine at a bodega and I suspect there is better tripe to be had. How to get it? Who knows. I have not seen tripe with adjectives such as “grass-fed”, “humanely raised”, or “local”. There has to be a market for tripe or the masters of marketing meat could likely create it, but I could not find it anywhere. And I’ve been looking.
The starting point is, after acquisition, a few pounds of tripe and lots of water. A short sleeve shirt and your favorite brand of perfumed hand soap should be included in the ingredients below because they are, in the parlance of Jay-Z, so necessary. With running cold water and your short sleeves on, rinse the tripe by running water over it while rubbing tripe on tripe vigorously. A good practice was to set my timer for 15 minutes and when time was up, I had it as far as I would take it.
Next I repeated the process with lime juice and salt in place of the water and for only about 5 minutes. At the end of this process, I let the tripe sit with the lime/salt mixture for a half hour. Then I repeated with rinsing process above for another ten minutes. When this was done, I cut the tripe into pieces and blanched it along with the pork trotters (you could easily use a cow’s foot) in salted water.
While the feet and stomach lining were blanching, I sweated onions and garlic then added 3/4 of a gallon of water. Finally after draining the tripe and trotters from the blanching water, I added them to the pot of water, garlic and onions. After an entire morning of boiling, I re-hydrated a bunch of cascabel chilis and blended them with some of the cooking liquid. This mixture was added back to the pot and the kitchen went from, as noted above, outhouse to somewhere a little nicer.
Over the bowl of menudo went a squeeze of lime juice, scallions, and after the first bite, pickled jalapenos. The bodega had chicharrones carnudo, which were intended to be chopped and sprinkled over the top, but honestly they never made it out of the car. Amazing stuff. I added the pickled jalapenos to balance the richness and to provide heat. The cascabeles are not terribly spicy and the heat was welcomed.
The smell in the house has dissipated by this point and the bowl of menudo had the more familiar smell associated with Sunday menudo. For me, it smells more of fresh corn tortillas and less like tripe. The tripe went from rubbery to soft without mushiness. I would update the recipe to have a little more heat maybe by adding pureed roasted serranos, and I might try playing around with the cut on the tripe. I like the way the tripe is cut in pho where it resembles noodles. The soup was a delicious first try, which is good because I have two quarts left and no one else eats it in our house.
Note: A big inspiration to me, and others cooking offal, Jennifer McLagan, won another very well-deserved James Beard award last week. The honor was well deserved and then some. Check out all of her books.
Menudo
Adapted from Serious Eats
Tripe
- 2 pounds beef tripe
- Salt
- 2 large limes
Soup
- 2 pig trotters, split
- 6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
- 1/2 medium onion, chopped
- 1 tablespoon dried oregano
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 ounces dried chiles cascabeles, stems, seeds removed
- 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds, ground
- Neutral oil
- Salt
Step one: Rinse tripe more thoroughly than you thought possible – Rubbing tripe on tripe with a good bit of force — under cold water.
Step two: Add salt and juice from two limes and continue the tripe on tripe action. Let sit for 30 minutes.
Step three: Boil water. Heavily salt water. Rinse again under cold water. Cut in 1/2″ by 2″ chunks. Boil prepared tripe and trotters for 15 minutes. Drain.
Step four: Heat a second pot. Add oil, garlic, bay, oregano and onion and sweat them until translucent.
Step five: Add 3 quarts water and the tripe and trotters. Bring to a boil. Boil for 2-3 hours.
Step six: Remove trotters to cool. Toast chiles and cover them with boiling water. Let sit for 30 minutes, covered.
Step seven: Blend chilies in a cup of the cooking liquid. Pour into the menudo and add cumin.
Step eight: Pick trotters, add to menudo. Cook for 30 additional minutes. Serve hot covered in scallions and lime.
