With a rise in nose-to-tail cooking reflected on restaurant menus and a desire for home cooks to explore more inexpensive proteins, you might be wondering about tripe. What is it, exactly? For more info, we consulted chef Nicolás López of Mercado Little Spain in New York City.

What Is Tripe?

Tripe is a type of edible lining from the stomach of cows or other animals such as pigs and sheep. Tripe is frequently cooked in stews, soups and braised dishes.

Is Tripe Healthy?

López considers tripe healthy as it is high in protein and collagen and low in fat, although it is high in cholesterol.

From a nutrition standpoint, “3 cooked ounces of tripe provides 79.9 calories, 9.94 grams of protein, 3.44 grams of total fat, 1.16 grams of saturated fat, and 133 mg of cholesterol. Although the total and saturated fat is on the lower side, it does not qualify by FDA guidelines as a lean or extra-lean meat due to its higher cholesterol count,” says Toby Amidor, MS, RD, CDN nutrition expert at FoodNetwork.com and Wall Street Journal bestselling cookbook author. “It also provides a nice amount of numerous micronutrients like iron, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, niacin, choline, and zinc.” She also notes that because of tripe’s tough and chewy texture, it may be a challenging to chew for those with dentures or dental issues.

What Does Tripe Taste Like?

Tripe has a mild taste that readily takes on the flavors of the other ingredients it’s cooked with. “The tripe is a good "sponge" with mild flavor that takes all the aromas of the stew ingredients,” López says.

Types of Tripe

There are several kinds of tripe depending on which animal it comes from, including beef, pork, lamb and goat tripe. López shares that in Spain, they also make stews with codfish tripe.

There are also three different kinds of tripe that are named according to the part of the stomach it comes from and for its appearance.

Blanket tripe: comes from the first stomach and resembles a solid, shaggy sheet.

Honeycomb tripe: comes from the second stomach, and is so named because its surface has diamond-shaped raised cells across it.

Book (or bible) tripe: comes from the third stomach and whose stacked folds resemble the pages of a book.

The fourth and last stomach compartment has a more glandular texture and is therefore not typically used.

How to Prepare and Enjoy Tripe

Fresh tripe needs to be properly cleaned and cooked for a long time, ideally as part of a soup, stew or braised dish. “Whatever stew you decide to make, remember, tripe needs more than 4 hours of boiling to be soft!” López says.

How to Clean Tripe

Nowadays, most tripe is sold already clean. In that case, butchers have “dressed” the tripe, which means they boiled the stomach and peeled off the lining (the part used in cooking), then trimmed any excess fat and bleached it white. If that’s the case, all you have to do is run it under cold running water to remove excess bleach before preparing it. If your butcher hasn’t already cleaned the tripe for you, you’ll need to first clean the “undressed” tripe, which has a greenish/brown color. López advises making an exfoliating mixture by combining a large handful of coarse salt with half cup of vinegar and using it to scrub the tripe clean; then rinse tripe under cool running water.

Turn It Into Menudo (Mexican Tripe Soup)

For this traditional Mexican soup, pieces of honeycomb tripe (beef or sheep) are simmered in a spicy broth with aromatics for several hours till tender, then often combined with hominy. Bowls of menudo can be served with accompaniments such as corn tortillas, cilantro, chile sauce, chopped onions, lime wedges or sliced radishes.

Make Callos (Spanish Tripe Stew)

Callos are traditional stewed tripe dishes that are found across Spain and whose components vary regionally. López shares that callos are “mostly always beef tripes and trotters, or other "cheap parts" of the animal like the mouth or the ears, cooked for a long time with a base of fried tomato, smoked pimentón, spices such as cloves, bay leaf or cumin, and usually chorizo, sometimes pork belly or even morcilla (blood sausage).”

Turn it into Trippa Alla Fiorentina (Florentine Tripe)

In Italy, tripe is used to make a Roman-style dish called Trippa Alla Fiorentina, in which tripe is simmered in a tomato-based sauce with aromatics. It is served with grated Parmesan and often accompanied by sides such as boiled or pureed potatoes or cannellini beans in oil.

Make a batch of Mondongo (Tripe Soup)

There are several iterations of this hearty soup/stew served across Latin America, including Peruvian cau cau, a soup made with beef tripe, potatoes and veggies and seasoned with mint, and Colombian mondongo, which also incorporates veggies such as yuca, as well as proteins such as pork and sometimes chorizo. Mondongo can also be found in some parts of the Caribbean and in the Philippines.

Enjoy It In Dim Sum

According to Andy Liang, recipe developer at Food Network, there are two common dim sum dishes that incorporate tripe. First, you may see tripe with a ruffled lining that comes braised and accompanied with oyster sauce, soy sauce, braised daikon radish and other darker braised organ meat. Second, you may see it simmered until tender, stir fried with aromatics and steamed to keep warm. This tripe uses the stomach lining that look like small beads or pills sticking out.

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