A friend arrived with a bucket of fresh organic pig's blood a couple of days ago, this was the opportunity that we have been waiting for. Fed up with eating black puddings, posing as being made from traditional recipes, but actually made from dried imported blood, here was our chance to make our own genuine organic pudding.
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| Fresh organic pig's blood |
The first problem was to locate a traditional Irish recipe, there were plenty telling us how to use them in cooking, but few were found on how to actually make them and those ones had quantities of white breadcrumbs in them, that we wished to avoid. Not having used fresh blood before, the safest course of action was to use a sensible French recipe. So, we began with Jennifer McLagan's
Boudin Noir. This proved to be a success and good starting point.
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| Black pudding made with fresh organic pig's blood, ready for the oven. |
The next morning, feeling a lot braver and considerably more foolhardy, it was time to go it alone and create our own recipe to try and achieve the traditional style of Irish black pudding, that we were aiming for.
It turned out to be as simple as rendering down some organic pork back fat, cooking onions in the fat, adding cooked pearl barley, oat flakes, spices and last of all: the blood. Then baking it all in a bath of water, in the oven.
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| Traditional homemade black pudding ready to cook for breakfast |
What a delicious breakfast - two different types of homemade, locally sourced, blood pudding, fried slowly with a nob of country butter. The first one was very rich and light in texture and the second was exactly as we had hoped: moist with a rich traditional flavour.
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| Homemade black pudding almost ready for the breakfast table |
From now on, we will find it difficult to buy blood puddings, as we know that we can make vastly superior ones, in full awareness of the origin of all the main ingredients.
Email:
kilkennyseakale@gmail.com
