Black pudding

Yesterday was largely spent making black pudding – the bucket finally had the use for which we bought it!
It’s not actually very hard, just a bit time-consuming, and even that’s only because the batch size is so large. Our recipe (based on the one in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Cookbook) is for 2 litres of blood, which doesn’t sound that much. However, our stock pot was only just large enough to contain the mixture once it had been made up! We’ve ended up with, I guess, well over 12 pounds of black pudding! And, given that it doesn’t freeze, that means our friends are going to be getting lots of free black pudding. And that, next time, we’ll be doing half quantities :-)
Anyhow, here’s a small proportion of the produce (the puddings are 6-12 inches long):

The one surprise was that the puddings took a lot longer to cook than Hugh F-W. suggested – more like half an hour than 5 minutes! However, we also made some blood cakes (the same thing, but cooked in the oven instead of boiled in a skin), which worked fine and are easier, so perhaps that’s the route to take next time. They’re just not as satisfying somehow as the puddings!
Anyhow, we’ve now got lots of nice gluten-free British-style black pudding (made with rice instead of oats and barley) – the first black pudding Anne’s had in 23 years! And jolly nice it is, too :-)

pax et bonum

Article posted at 11:30am on 09 February 2005
Category: Food, Life, Struggling, General

Hi I’m coeliac searching for gluten-free black pudding. How did you source your “blood” and did you simply replace barley/oats for rice in same amounts? Hope you don’t mind me asking Thanks Chiquita

chiquita ()
09:37am on 13 August 2005

There’s a full recipe here, whih also gives another variant we tried. Basically, yes, I substituted in equal amounts. The blood we got from a friendly pig farmer – to meet such people, try hanging out at Farmers’ Markets or similar. If you can’t find one (and it might be hard), you can buy freeze-dried blood. There’s a link in the post I’ve already cited.

HTH!

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
10:04am on 13 August 2005