Making boudin noir, drinking wine

Steaming boudin noir Somewhere in the Loire
First, sorry for pouring you, in this story, a type of red (pictured on left) which is not exactly the one that you'd expect in this context...
Boudin noir or blood [sorry again] sausage is one of these very simple dishes that don't need a sophisticated training to prepare, but few home cooks actually venture into the real thing, although that's both very cheap and a sure way to get a product without preservatives and other food additives. We are going here to review again how simple this recipe really is, so that you can decide for yourself if you're up to the job.

This story took place in an undisclosed village of Touraine (Loire), and this bulk of blood sausage was intended for a village event, like my first wine-pairing story featuring this popular dish. You never know if the French or European food-safety police is watching, so anonymity is the best option.

I rode my motorcycle to a village and an address which I had been given to me by one of the guys on the pictures, an experienced kitchen master, and everything took place in an outbuilding behind the owner's house; it is amazing how much room you need when you begin to prepare a particular dish, and an outbuilding or an annex, a converted garage is perfect, you can put all the mess in there without bothering to clean it all before preparing dinner, and the cement floor is taken care of with a simple garden hose. Still, this cooking routine was a man's thing, women have probably enough work with the family needs to add this village treat. Plus, all this blood......

Mincing the ingredients The first part of the blood sausage preparation is nos as photogenic as the following, you need to grind the different ingredients of the boudin noir before mixing them with pig blood. Here, a professional tool like this meat grinder is a plus, but they're well often equipped in the countryside as they learned for ages to prepare their own food, be it for canned vegetables or charcuterie.

People in the French provinces used to kill their own pig and prepare meat products from it (something like twice a year if I'm right for a family) but now they buy the pork in supermarkets where of course you don't get the farm quality.
In certain seasons of the year (in winter if I remember) some supermarkets in the backcountry sell pork at very low prices like 1,5 € a kilo and that's usually when people revive their home butcher lab.
Here the meat was gorge de porc or pork throat, the label reads that the pig was raised in France and the figures indicate a price per kilo of 4,8 €.
You need to first slice the meat so that it can be funneled into the meat grinder along with the onions and parsil.

For a load of 50 kg of boudin noir at the end, you need to have 30 liters of blood, 25 kg of throat meat, 12 kg of onions, a big bowl of parsil and salt (12 grams per kilogram) plus pepper (3 grams per kilogram). Pork throat has lots of fat, I guess it's part of the interest of this meat cut for the dish, even though there may be more fat in industrially-raised pigs than in a pig raised in your backyard. Begin to mix Step one made, now we're beginning to have a closer picture of the final product, at least of what you'll find inside the blood sausage. here is the mix with the meat, the onions, parsil and salt, you can add pepper or other personnal touch, just be moderate with the salt, the main criticism against certain blood sausages is that they're too salty, the people maybe sometimes oversalting the dish to keep it safe from bacteria, I don't know. Mix ready with blood Here is the whole mix, complete with the blood. Sorry, I missed the crucial pouring of the blood but you might as well be spared this gory scene. The meat preparation is now almost ready for use, I mean almost ready for the funnel. We could even say that it's almost finished now because as you will see the following stages are very short. Heating the farce Before you begin to stuff the blood-sausage mixture into the intestines with a funnel, you must make sure that this mixture has the right viscosity. For that you need to mix the right proportion of blood but also heat a bit the wholme thing so that it's smooth enough and fill harmoniously the fragile envelope.
Forget your apprehension, you must put yur hands into this bloody stuff to really estimate the smoothness and readiness of the mixture. I personally have second thoughts about having my hands soaked in blood, not only because of disease transmission, but I'm not used to it. Pushing the intestine into the funnel A tricky part is to put the casing, here the intestine at the narrow end of the funnel. The intestines are also an ingredient, I forgot to list it above, you can order them at a butcher shop in France, it costs almost nothing and it's natural if not very appetizing when you think about it, at list for a first-timer.

Of course you washed the intestine beforehand under the tap, letting wather flow through it like a hose. I didn't shot a picture of this stage but that's strange to see this improvised water hose in your kitchen sink. I think they've been cleaned already anyway when you bought them but that's better to do it again. You can see on the right the outlook of these intestines when you purchase them. I hope that at this stage you haven't lost all desire to eat blood sausage in the foreseable future...
Some industrial blood sausage may be made with an alternative casing for more reliability and productivity reasons, but the real stuff is made using intestines and nobody got sick eating this kind of fresh charcuterie made from real ingredients. I didn't specify it but of course this dish is prepared without food additives, be it artificial casing, preservatives or taste enhancers.

The intestines are thin when empty (sorry for this allusion) and it's not that easy to bring the opening to the funnel's end iven if it's not that big. Gerard had to try several times each time before succeeding the operation, and he's an expert in the trade. Filling it Now comes what we could almost label as the easiest part, considering you prepared the mixture with the right grinding and viscosity. You still have to be careful and watch for defects or small cuts in the intestines as the filling coud drain outside during the cooking in this case. Intestines are known to be very long but you'll usually choose to make a limited length of blood sausage at a time, a couple of meters or so and then cut the intestine for the next batch. The couronne or serpentin-shaped crown must be manageable when you'll cook it.

You can do this operation alone, alternatively pouring the almost-liquid mixture at the top of the funnel, and helping the thing go down the intestine by gravity, like you'd do to force-feed a goose (I need to write a story about foie gras to have some of you disgusted from the thing, it may bring down its price for us diehard fans).
Again, for this dish preparation you need to put your unease with blood aside because you have your hands soaked into it. I recognize that I'd had difficulty to make boudin noir myself, at least for the first time. Watching it and doing it are different things.

The blood sausage (boudin noir) is one of the oldest Gallic/French dish, but it is said to have been invented in ancient Greece. I read somewhere that during the Middle Ages it was a very common dish in French taverns, but the dish was then more spicy than today (today there are no spices actually), maybe to increase a bit its shelf life. The blood sausage is sait to have travelled all over the world, includding in England, particularly Scotland.
Some cultures like the muslim one forbid the eating of blood, but as it translates for them into yearly rituals of rejoicing while letting poor sheeps bleed to death in the bathtub without pre-stunning (and given the record of this culture in other bloody matters), I'm not sure I'll trust the no-eat-blood lobby... Watch all the process Pictures are full of informations but there's nothing like a video to give you a good feel of all this work. Here are a few minutes shot all along the making of boudin noir, you'll see successively the different stages, not necessarily in the chronological order because several batches of sausage were prepared in parallel to spare time and keep the cast iron pot busy.
At one point toward the end, you'll see how the intestines fill themselves by sheer gravity, the sausage looking like a snake moving through the metal plate. The irreplaceable cauldrons Here are kitchen tools or containers that play a central role in the making of boudin noir : the big-size cast iron cauldrons, some sort of very heavy stewpot which was used by farmers and country people in the past to keep soup with meat and vegetable hot all the time. I heard that they were also used to prepare the pigs' food and to make jam.
All you had to do in the past was to hang the heavy thing in the fireplace and keep a quiet fire underneath, we're in a world where there was lots of time. Today you have these convenient gas burners and you can cook outdoor or in a side building so that your living quarters keep cool and without heavy smells.
These chaudrons (cauldrons) are sought after today and when you find some on the flea markets they're either holed or they are very expensive. You can find new chaudrons but they're even more expensive it seems (and smaller), and they don't have this clever multi-layer lid. Time to cook the boudin noir You understand here why you need to make a batch of blood sausage no bigger than 1,5 meter or 2 meters. You have to cook it in the boiling water but you have also to retrieve it, and that's not an easy task.
The water must keep short of boiling to be precise, it's not good to have it boiling because it can make the boudin burst. You cook it during something like 20 minutes, beware of not cooking it too long, it also could split apart the intestines.
Here our cook just lets the blood-sausage crown slide into the cauldron, the less you manipulate the thing the better chance you keep it whole.
You can add a few herbes de Provence and laurel leaves in the water to add a bit of taste. I think that the water can be salted too. Taking it out Now the finish line is close, that's when you must take extra caution because taking the blood sausage out of the hot water pot is much more tricky than letting it slide into it. Two people are not too much for this last handling.
You can see that the color of the sausage has veered toward the brownish nuances we're familiar with. Another couronne is ready and this batch of 2 meters of boudin noir will join the others on the table. Time for another type of red It was past 1pm when the cooks decided to make a pause, it was time to eat and one of them opened a bottle of wine (not planned by me) to relax for a few minutes. They were to continue prepare and cook their batches of blood sausage later in the afternoon. The wine was a Côtes du Rhône and I thought then that I should have brought a couple of bottles for this moment, it would have been the least I could do for my passive rome in this cooking session.

The blood-sausage rolls were put together in home-made insulated cool boxes, complete with styrofoam in the inside, and a day or two later it would be lightly fried or panned and served at the village in question.

I hope that this photo story will help you realize that it takes just a bit of courage to decide make boudin noir yourself. The ingredients are affordable and you can freeze your culinary Art and serve it later, saying proudly to your bewildered party : "I did it myself..."
and you know what ? I feel closer to make my own boudin noir than my own wine, because if you miss you don't have to wait another year to try again.

Quantities for a family : 1,5 to 2 liters of pig blood 2,5 to 3 kg of throat meat (pork) 1 kg onions a handful of parsil 12 grams per kg of salt 3 grams of pepper of pepper A mop to clean all the mess...

Still life with steaming blood sausage

Comments

[Mike]

You can add some cooked barley to the mix before filling the casing, it gives extra texture and is delicious too.... :-)

[Dirk De la Marche]

Blood-sausages in Belgium are usually spiced with "medieval" spices such as mace, nutmeg and cinnamon. Sometimes raisins and sugar are added for a sweet version. Though we like French blood-sausages they are bland in comparison; tastes differ, of course...

[Frank]

Thanks, Bert. A very interesting story. I've made boudin blanc, which is certainly easier - no blood, no boiling.

And I await your foie gras post. The first time my wife tasted it she looked up and said, "This goes against all my principles, but I love it!" We have passed foie gras farms that advertise tours, but never stopped - it would be good to see how it's made, and whether the geese are happy, although in my experience there is no such thing as a happy goose.

[Craig]

Another great post. I recently had some experience making bratwurst with friends, and this makes me thirsty to try my hand at boudin noir, if we can get ahold of the blood which is illegal here as well. So sorry you had to hide these artisans faces to keep their anonymity.

[Bert]

It is not illegal at all to buy pig blood here, you just have to find the butcher who wants to order a bucket for you (they don't make much money with this).
No need to hide their face in the sense that it's not illegal to make blood sausage per-se, I just avoid to tell the village's name because this boudin noir will be served in a village event and this artisanal kitchen maybe doesn't meet the norms...