Morcilla

150g dried pig blood
900 ml water
500g hard pork back fat
400g dry Arborio rice, cooked
100g onion, fine chopped
10g garlic, crushed
5g thyme
10g Pimentón (sweet smoked paprika)
50g salt
5g black pepper
beef runners

Making Morcilla (Spanish black pudding) is a big deal for me. I have been a fan of blood sausage for a long time now and it's the texture I love as much as the taste. I also warm to the 'waste no part of the animal' attitude of its origins. It's an odd journey for someone like me, raised to eat neither pork nor blood products. I wonder if there are other Jewish black-pudding fans out there? Maybe we should start a club. Or a support group?

This is a different type of product to a fresh meat sausage so for me it represents yet another new branch of my sausage-making experiences. Like Boudin Blanc, Morcilla is a pre-cooked sausage. These spent an hour and 20 minutes poaching in water at 80 degrees C. I am going to have to get a bigger pot for this kind of thing, as my largest pot is a domestic pressure-cooker base and it could barely cope with the load.

Again, I chose to use a recipe from The Sausage Book. I have seen other recipes for making blood sausage that use just a funnel, nozzle and ladle to get the blood mixture into the casings. No stuffer required. But with this recipe, the rice gives the pre-cooked sausage a firm rather than a runny texture such that a sausage stuffer is needed to get the mixture into the casings. The rice is not noticeable in the finished sausage which has a light and fluffy-yet-sticky texture; something that I enjoy about black pudding.

My biggest problem came with tying off the links. These need to be tied off with string rather than just twisting the casing like a regular sausage. This is partly because the mixture is more runny than sausage meat and also the beef runners are thicker walled than hog casings and more likely to open. I tried to use lightweight cooking twine but it was not up to the job and kept breaking. The result was that one of my puddings spilled its contents into the poaching pan. A terrible loss. Next time I will invest in some butchers' string and tie them off properly.

I don't know if the thyme is right in this recipe. There is not enough to make a difference to taste, so next time I will either leave it out or increase the quantity. Maybe some rosemary would work well along side it.

This is the first time that I got to use beef runners to make sausage. I have enough left for another batch and then I will try using beef middles to see the difference in size and shape it produces.