Offal & the Whole Animal · Main
Trippa alla Romana
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 1 kg honeycomb tripe, cleaned and blanched by the butcher
- 1 lemon, halved
- 60 ml olive oil
- 100 g onion, finely diced
- 60 g carrot, finely diced
- 60 g celery, finely diced
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed
- 100 ml dry white wine
- 800 g peeled plum tomatoes, crushed
- 10 g mint leaves
- 80 g pecorino romano, grated
- Fine salt and black pepper
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float testBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · celery · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cover the tripe with cold water, add the lemon halves, boil hard for 10 minutes, then drain, rinse and cut it into strips 1 cm wide. 10 min
- Sweat the onion, carrot, celery and garlic in the oil over low heat until soft and sweet with no colour, about 12 minutes. 12 min
- Pour in the wine and reduce until the pan smells of wine rather than raw alcohol, then add the tomatoes and the tripe with water to just cover.
- Simmer covered at a bare tremble for 2.5 to 3 hours, until a strip gives with no spring when you press it and the sauce coats the tripe. 180 min
- Off the heat, stir through the torn mint and half the pecorino, correct the salt, and send the rest of the cheese to the table.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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