Sichuan Cottage (Marlboro, NJ ) Updates

Intestines generally have a texture closest to cooked clams. Especially with the cow there are so many intestine/stomach parts it’s hard to generalize the texture. Tripe and tubey intestines are totally different, as are other parts of the stomach too.

Generally speaking the closest thing would be cooked clams out of what you listed in terms of texture, other than the comby tripes which have like a crunch to it. It’s hard to describe because you say crunch and people think potato chips, but it’s a very different thing from that, there’s no adequate word in english for it.

As for some of my favorites, beef small (?) intestines, probably the easiest place to try this is at your local taqueria, known as tripas (not to be confused with tripe, it’s not that). The mexican places do a hard cook on these and the outsides get crispy, and you get the digestive fluids on the inside that has an earthy funk and a ricotta like texture. Kind of like the inside of a cooked oyster. Without the crisp, if you just cook it in a soup or something, it’s just a fun gummy chew.

The comby tripes have almost no flavor and are mainly a texture thing, as mentioned hard to describe other than crunchy chewy.

The other stomachs are more or less similar, and have various levels of gummy/chewy/crunch to it. The pork intestine mentioned for this dish is probably the stinkiest (the rest don’t stink IMO) and most challenging. So it goes well with flavors like sichuan which masks the stink.

Koreans also do what they call “large intestine”, which is one of the intestines flipped inside out so that all the fat lining the outside goes inside to look like a sausage. It’s basically all fat but delectable.

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