Matumbo, liver and kidneys: cleaning and cooking offal properly

Matumbo, liver and kidneys are the cheapest protein in the butchery and the most often ruined. Not because they are difficult, but because they are cleaned badly and cooked in a hurry. Both are fixable in an afternoon.

Matumbo (tripe): the cleaning is the whole job

Tripe arrives already washed, but it still needs work. Rinse it under cold running water, then rub it with coarse salt and a cut lemon or a splash of vinegar. Scrub the honeycomb side with your fingers, not a brush — you want to lift the film, not shred the surface. Rinse until the water runs clear and the smell has dropped.

Then blanch it: put it in cold water with a thumb of ginger and a bay leaf, bring it to a boil, and throw that water away. This is not cooking. It is the step that removes what the washing could not.

Now cook it properly. Matumbo needs 90 minutes to two hours of gentle simmering before it is tender enough to fry. The mistake people make is boiling it for twenty minutes, declaring it tough, and giving up. Cook it in salted water until a knife goes through without resistance, then cut it into strips and finish it in a pan with onions, garlic, tomato and a little of its own broth.

Buy beef matumbo here, already cleaned.

Liver: hot pan, short time, no crowd

Liver is the opposite of matumbo. It wants a screaming hot pan and about ninety seconds a side. Beyond that it goes grainy and chalky, and no sauce hides it.

Dry the slices with kitchen paper before they go in — wet liver steams instead of browning. Salt it just before, not before that, or it will weep. And cook it in batches: if the pieces touch each other, the pan cools and you get grey liver.

Beef liver is stronger than lamb or chicken liver. If the taste is too much for you, soak the slices in milk for twenty minutes and pat them dry. That pulls out some of the iron without changing the texture.

Both beef liver and lamb liver are cut to order.

Kidneys: split, soak, then decide

Ask for them split lengthways and trimmed of the white core — that core is where the bitterness lives, and it takes ten seconds to remove with a knife.

Soak them in salted water for half an hour if you want a milder taste, then dry them well. Kidneys release a lot of liquid as they cook, so start them in a dry hot pan and let that liquid cook off before you add anything else. Once it has gone, add butter, onions and a splash of stock, and finish with black pepper.

Do not overcook them. Kidney should be just firm, still slightly pink inside. Grey and rubbery means it stayed on the heat too long.

One rule for all three

Offal is a same-day ingredient. It does not improve in the fridge the way a steak does. Cook it within a day of buying it, or freeze it on the day you get it and cook it from frozen-thawed within two months.

What to ask at the counter

Ask for matumbo cleaned and cut, kidneys split and cored, liver sliced to the thickness you want. Ours come from the same animals as the rest of the counter — halal, cut that morning, never frozen.

Any weight from half a kilo, cut to order, and same-day delivery across Nairobi if you order before 6:30 PM. Pay by M-Pesa to till 9700565 when you order.