Will It Be Sous Vide? Too Much Blood Sausage
Hello sous-vide friends, and welcome to the rather upbeat version ofWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column where I do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
So, first of all, TRIGGER WARNING: HELLA BLOOD. Even though Corned Beef was the winner of last week’s selection of topics , it has a weekly pickle time, which means we’ll have to wait a bit to explore this fully. However, I still needed a topic for this week, so I opted for the less interesting but still very Irish blood sausage idea by Carrie Mathison :
I am not a squicky person, and was able to detect the blood of any pigs, so the black pudding operation was on the way. For those of you unfamiliar with this staple of an Irish breakfast, blood sausage is blood sausage made from pork blood, some fats, seasonings, and some kind of binder like oatmeal. There are many variations, but I chose this simple recipe from Epicurious . Unfortunately, the only blood I could find in such a short time was frozen – and I didn’t have a pig to drain – but that was fine with me. (If you want to try making blood sausage, call your local butcher, as you are unlikely to find it in your regular grocery store.)
You might think thawing blood, pig or whatever, would be a fairly straightforward process, but you’re a little wrong. While most of it melted in a large bowl at room temperature, there were these gelatinous pieces that simply wouldn’t liquefy even when placed in a pot of hot water.
The point is, those last bloody drops didn’t actually appear frozen — they weren’t even cold — but rather frozen. I thought about heating them a little more, but I didn’t want the blood to cook before it was added to the sausage mixture, so I tried a different approach and grabbed my hand blender. I knew full well that this could be a terrible idea, ending with a very Carrie-like look at me and the walls of my kitchen, but luckily everything went well and the blood turned to liquid pretty quickly without incident.
Fun fact about blood: It’s really shiny and I’m pretty sure I will find tiny red spots in my kitchen for the rest of the century.
I then strained the blood into a large bowl with the rest of the pudding mixture, following the recipe above from Bon Appetit . (Basically, you just need blood, some lard, milk, oatmeal, onions, and seasonings. I also added garlic because I love garlic as hell.)
This blood sausage article recommends a final core temperature of 154-158 degrees Fahrenheit, so I set my Anova to 155 ℉ and greased some jars with oil. Given the fact that moisture cannot evaporate during sous vide cooking, I was a little worried about how liquid the blood pudding mixture was, so I prepared two jars, one with a lot of blood and the other with a lot of blood. drain from the rest of the ingredients.
These two jars did not affect my supply of blood batter, so I also prepared a baking dish for comparison. Even with that extra baked lot of blood in my fridge, I still have a kind of endless bowl of raw mixture. This job has some strange “perks”. [Editor’s note: Extra blood is a luxury.]
Anyway. I put the cans in the tub and the foil-lined skillet in the oven (set at 325 ℉) and then tried to clean out the bloody mess.
In an hour and a half, the internal temperature of the pudding in the jars reached 155 ℉ and an hour for baking bread in the oven. After they were all ready, I let them cool down a bit on the counter before letting them cool and freeze in the refrigerator overnight.
In the morning I took out the jars and ran a thin knife along the edge to pull the pudding out of the glass case. The thinner sample immediately began to fall apart.
It was a little easier for the drier brothers, but still it was not what I would call “hard”.
Neither one nor the other could be cut.
On the other hand, the casserole behaved exactly as it should.
Then it’s time to fry.
The sous video samples weren’t all that good.
But the baked goods turned out to be quite good and roasted very well around the edges as expected.
And now we have to ask ourselves: will the blood sausage be sous vide?
The answer is no . While there was no discernible difference in taste between the sous vide’d and the baked samples – they were good, to be honest, I would have added more salt and pepper to both – the texture of the material in the cans was completely wrong. Blood sausage is already a soft layer of meat for breakfast, and a very humid cooking environment is not conducive to this. So, if you are looking to indulge yourself with traditional Irish fries, I would prefer to bake your puddings, regardless of color. If you don’t like blood pate, in which case I cannot recommend this cooking method.