What is Blood Sausage?

Blood Sausages have been around for 1,000s of years all over the world. It is commonly mixed with a grain or other coagulant to thicken the blood then stuffed into a casing and either cooked or dried. It is called blood pudding in the UK, Blutworst in Germany, Boudin Noir in France almost every country has it’s own name for it and they can differ slightly or wildly but they all share blood as a main ingredient. Now, we might have already lost some of you as soon as we started talking about blood but don’t be put off by that, when properly prepared it can be delicious and perfectly safe!

Meat Block

3 lb of Pork Butts
1/2 lb of Pork Fat
2 Cups Diced Onion
Pork Blood
2.5 oz Swiss Style Bratwurst Seasoning
1 oz of Carrot Fiber
1/4 oz of Sure Cure

Equipment

Walton’s #12 Meat Grinder
Walton’s 11 lb Sausage Stuffer
20 lb Meat Mixer

Prep & Grind

Just to make sure everything will be ready when you need it go ahead and soak your natural hog casings in hot water so they will be ready later.

Now, it is always important to make sure everything is kept cold when making sausage but it is especially important here. So we are putting our grinder head assembly, plates and knives in the freezer before we do our grinding here. We will go first through a 3/8 plate and then a 3/16 plate and we will add our pork fat during the second grind. Now put this meat in the fridge for now.

Dice your onions very finely and caramelize them in some of the extra pork fat if you have any left over, or if you don’t just some vegetable oil.

Meat Mixing

Next, in a clean bowl add the onions, meat, seasoning, cure, half the carrot fiber and start adding blood, about a pint at a time, and start mixing. Keep adding blood and carrot fiber until you have achieved the desired consistency. It will be a thick slurry but still liquid. If this has taken you more than a few minutes I would recommend you put this mixture in the freezer for a few minutes.

Sausage Stuffing

Now load your stuffer with the mix and load on your natural casings. You want to be careful here and slowly crank the handle so that the mixture comes almost to the end of the stuffing tube and then you want to tie off the end of your casing. Now stuff carefully, you do not want any blowouts here, remember an understuffed casing can be twisted a few more times to firm it up if necessary but there is nothing to be done about a blowout. Now, we are going to twist and tie off each casing so that everything stays where it needs to be during the cooking process.

Thermal Processing & Smoking

And the thing we are going to do to cook these is to poach them in 170° water for 15-20 minutes to firm them up. We are just using our Vacmaster SV1 cooker for this but you can use a pot of water, just make sure that you do not get the water too hot, 170 is about as high as we want to go.

Now remove them from the water and smoke them at 180° until the internal temperature is 160°, or you can add them to soups or other dishes.

Additional Tips

• As always make sure you keep your meat as cold as you can before grinding. This not only helps speed the grinding process but also helps with food safety which is especially important here if you are going to try to flatten it out.
• The Blood may be coagulated and hard to mix with other ingredients. We decided to pulse the Blood in a Blend just a few times and that helped out a lot, as the Blood became liquid again.

Watch WaltonsTV: Specialty Sausage 104: Blood Sausage

Shop waltonsinc.com for Walton’s #32 Meat Grinder

Shop waltonsinc.com for Natural Hog Casings

Shop waltonsinc.com for Sausage Stuffers