Flat Tripe

Cow Cow
AKA: Rumen, Blanket Tripe, Smooth Tripe
Primal: Organs (US)
Cooking Methods: Braise
Fat Content: High
Price: Budget
Cow - Flat Tripe

Flat Tripe may not be the most popular of Beef cuts but it can yield a flavorful plate of food when cooked the right way. It might be hard to find tripe portions as not all meat retailers sell them readily. They are, however, frequently used in many delicacies and traditional recipes in different parts of the world.

Flat Tripe can often be a difficult cut to cook because of its toughness. In this regard, the fact that packaged tripe available in the market is already partially cooked proves to be of great help. To cook this processed portion of tripe, experts recommend employing cooking methods in which the tripe can be soaked in some type of a cooking liquid, such as wines, stocks or broths. For this reason, braising and stewing are two popular methods of preparing Flat Tripe and are known to deliver tasty results.

Extracted from the first chamber of the animal's stomach and has a smooth texture. Flat Tripe is located in the first chamber of the steer’s stomach, which is also called the rumen. It has a smooth, flat appearance, which is what inspires its names ‘Smooth’ and ‘Flat’ Tripe.

The word tripe is a 13th century French word, which means ‘entrails used as food’. The exact origin of this word is unknown but could have been taken from the Spanish word ‘tripa’ (meaning ‘suet’) or the Arabic word ‘therb’ (meaning ‘suet’ and ‘fold of a piece of cloth’).

Washed tripe was popular among the bourgeois class as a staple food item in the Victorian era (circa the last half of the 1900s). In subsequent years, the consumption of this once-popular food item went down considerably.

Popular Dishes: Khash (Armenian), Pickled Tripe, Tripe Soup, Tripes à la mode de Caen (French)

This information about Flat Tripe was sourced from our meat cut app