Boudin Noir (French Blood Sausage)
The most useful French page I can add, because I already make Irish black pudding and already source frozen blood — so the contrast writes itself. Boudin noir is smooth, almost a custard, sweet-spiced with cinnamon and clove and rum, and it has no grain at all. Where an Irish pudding puts pinhead oatmeal, France puts onion — a quarter of the whole sausage, sweated an hour without browning. The cereal is what makes a blood sausage Irish rather than French.
Sausage · French · Charcuterie
The most useful French page I can add, because I already make Irish black pudding and already source frozen blood — so the contrast writes itself. Boudin noir is smooth, almost a custard, sweet-spiced with cinnamon and clove and rum, and it has no grain at all. Where an Irish pudding puts pinhead oatmeal, France puts onion — a quarter of the whole sausage, sweated an hour without browning. The cereal is what makes a blood sausage Irish rather than French.
Ingredients
- % OF TOTAL MIX (blood sausage percentages are of the whole, not lean meat):
- 795 ml (27 fl oz) pork blood — 35%
- 568 g (1 lb 4 oz) pork back fat, diced — 25%, fried light brown first (see directions)
- 568 g (1 lb 4 oz) onion — 25%, a defining bulk ingredient, not a seasoning
- 204 g (7 oz) pork head meat or skins, precooked — 9%
- 136 ml (4½ fl oz) whole milk — 6%
- 34 g salt (1.5%)
- 4.5 g black pepper (0.2%)
- 9 g chopped parsley (0.4%)
- 1.1 g marjoram, 1.1 g nutmeg, 1.1 g cinnamon, 0.6 g ground cloves — the sweet-spice signature
- 11 ml rum (0.5%)
NO cure — cooked, refrigerated, short shelf life
- 36 mm hog casing
Directions
- Key ingredients: the blood handling is the same as my Black Pudding, Irish — same supplier (frozen, from the market near campus), same food-safety care.
- Sweat the onion an hour — this is where the sweetness lives: blanch at 90 °C for 5 minutes, then fry in the rendered fat on low heat for 60 minutes WITHOUT browning. This is a different, much longer operation than the Irish “sweat until soft,” and it’s not optional.
- Fry the fat first: dice the back fat and fry to light brown, then drain. In boudin noir the fat is a flavor element; in Irish black pudding it stays raw as visible white cubes. That single change is half the difference between the two.
- Blend smooth: everything into a food processor — blood, fat, onion, precooked meat, milk, seasoning. Boudin noir is smooth, and that IS the point.
- Stuff loosely: 36 mm hog casing, ladled into one long spiral, linked by twisting or twine.
- Poach — never boil: 80 °C / 176 °F for 35 minutes, then straight into cold water 5 minutes, drain, air-dry, refrigerate. Above a gentle poach the blood proteins coagulate and go grainy — same rule as the Irish version.
- Serve the canonical way: boudin noir aux pommes — with sautéed apple, which has no Irish equivalent.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. Marianski’s traditional boudin noir.
The three-way blood-sausage contrast (the teaching point). The filler tells you the country: nothing = France, oats = Ireland/Scotland, rice = Spain (Morcilla de Burgos), barley or bread = Germany (Blutwurst mit Graupen (German Blood Sausage with Barley)). Everything else is seasoning. Marianski’s boudin noir has no grain at all, and the space oatmeal occupies in an Irish pudding is occupied here by onion (25% vs my ~9%).
Variants, each real: à la crème (Normandy), aux noix (walnuts), de Lyon, à la flamande (raisins + brown sugar — the sweet end), and aux pommes as the canonical service.
A name to watch. “Boudin blanc” means the delicate French white sausage AND the Cajun rice boudin — the same name-collision as andouille; the collection’s two boudin-blanc files are actually the Cajun kind.
Still open. Ruhlman & Polcyn’s Charcuterie is on my shelf — worth a cross-check.