Moronga is the blood sausage of Mexico and Central America: pork blood mixed with fat, onion, fresh chile and herbs, stuffed into intestine and poached until it sets into a soft, dark, crumbly sausage. It is almost never eaten whole. It is broken up and fried with onion and jalapeño for tacos and gorditas, or stewed in a red or green chile salsa, which is how it shows up on market counters in central Mexico. The diagnostic flavour is the herb. Spanish morcillas lean on sweet spices, paprika and rice; a central-Mexican moronga carries fresh mint (hierbabuena) and oregano with serrano heat, and the south swaps in local chiles. The name varies as much as the recipe — rellena in central Mexico, morcilla or mormollo in the south and Yucatán, zoricua in Michoacán — and versions exist from Chihuahua to Panama. It is the Spanish morcilla rebuilt from a Mexican pantry. Blood must come from a licensed, inspected source. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from Mexican dictionary and newspaper descriptions and standard blood-sausage practice, and it is untested.
Ingredients
FILLING (about 2.5 kg / 5½ lb)
- 1,500 ml / 51 fl oz fresh pork blood, with anticoagulant, from a licensed processor (about 60% of the filling)
- 450 g / 1 lb pork back fat, diced 3–5 mm (about 18%)
- 450 g / 1 lb white onion, finely chopped (about 18%)
- 40 g / 1.4 oz serrano chiles (3–4), finely chopped
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 30 g / 1 oz lard, to cook the onions
HERBS AND SEASONING (for the whole batch)
- 15 g / ½ oz fresh mint (hierbabuena) leaves, finely chopped (a loose cup)
- 3 g Mexican oregano, rubbed
- 10 g fresh epazote leaves, chopped (optional)
- 40 g fine salt (about 1.6% of the filling)
- 3 g black pepper
- 1 g ground cumin
- 38–45 mm beef middles or 36–40 mm hog casings, about 10 ft / 3 m
- 1 roll butcher’s twine
TO SERVE
- 1 white onion and 2 jalapeños, sliced, for frying
- 16–20 corn tortillas, with salsa verde or chile rojo
Directions
Key ingredients
- In the collection: Black Pepper and fresh mint. Serve it with Salsa Verde or Roasted Tomatillo Salsa with Serranos, Onion and Cilantro and Corn Tortillas (Masa Harina). The Spanish parent is Morcilla de Burgos; the French one is Boudin Noir (French Blood Sausage).
- Blood first — the safety step: buy blood from a licensed, inspected source, treated with anticoagulant. US law (9 CFR 310.20) allows blood to be saved as food only at an official establishment from inspected-and-passed animals. Keep it at or below 38 °F / 3 °C, strain it through a fine sieve, and use it within 48 hours of collection. Sour smell or a solid clot means discard. Thawed frozen blood is fine once; never refreeze.
- Cook the aromatics: soften the onion in the lard over medium heat 10 minutes, add the serranos and garlic for 2 minutes more. Cooked onion is sweet and soft; raw onion would weep water into the casing and stay crunchy. Cool completely.
- Mix cold: stir the cooled onions, diced fat, mint, oregano, epazote, salt, pepper and cumin into the cold blood. Everything must be below 90 °F / 32 °C when it meets the blood or the blood begins to set in the bowl. The batter is thin; that is right.
- Stuff loosely: tie one end, ladle or funnel the batter in, and leave each link only about three-quarters full — blood swells as it cooks, and a tight link bursts. Tie off in 10–12 in / 25–30 cm lengths. Keep stirring the batter as you go so the fat does not settle.
- Poach, never boil: lower the links into water at 175–185 °F / 80–85 °C, turning them, for 45–60 minutes depending on thickness, until the centre reaches 160 °F / 71 °C and a needle prick shows no red liquid. Boiling curdles the blood into grains and splits casings. Prick any link that floats with trapped air.
- Chill: move to iced water, dry, refrigerate. It keeps 4–5 days chilled, or freeze.
- To serve — the Mexican way: slice, or squeeze from the casing, and fry in a little lard with sliced onion and jalapeño until the edges crisp, 6–8 minutes. Into tacos with salsa, or simmer the fried crumbles 10 minutes in salsa verde (moronga en salsa verde).
- Sibling recipe: the Louisiana blood sausage is Boudin Rouge (Louisiana Blood Boudin); the Argentine one is Morcilla Parrillera (Argentine Grilling Blood Sausage).
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. There is no single standard moronga, and no weighed Mexican formula is in print in the standard references. The ingredient set follows the Larousse Diccionario enciclopédico de la gastronomía mexicana (“Tripa rellena de sangre de cerdo mezclada con grasa, condimentos y especias”; the State of Mexico version with mint, oregano and green salsa) and El Universal’s account of how moronga is made (blood, lard, onion, cilantro, oregano, pepper; northern and central cooks season with onion, mint and oregano, southern ones with chile piquín or amashito). Proportions are standard blood-sausage practice. Deviations: (1) El Universal stirs the blood in a pan until it starts to set before stuffing; this recipe stuffs the raw batter and poaches, which gives an even set and a reliable internal temperature; (2) diced back fat replaces most of the lard as the fat, so the sausage has the white flecks of a classic blood sausage; (3) cumin and epazote are options, not rules. Untested.
Where moronga came from. The Spanish morcilla came with the colonists; Mexico had no pig to make one from before them. The State of Mexico and Toluca were famous for pork products from the sixteenth century — Alonso de Zorita mentions morcillas in Toluca’s market in the 1560s, and a nineteenth-century writer lists Toluca’s morongas with its chorizos and longanizas. The word moronga itself has no settled etymology.
The name, region by region. Larousse records rellena in central Mexico, morcilla de puerco in Chihuahua, morcilla or mormollo in the south and southeast, zoricua in Michoacán, and sangre de res in Oaxaca. In Yucatán it is sold beside buche with pickled onion and cilantro. Michoacán has a chicken-blood version and Hidalgo one from sheep or goat blood. Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua) has its own morongas, often with mint and sometimes with rue.
Variations. Southern style: replace the serrano with 2–3 g dried chile piquín and add a few leaves of fresh oregano. Pan-set style: cook the onions, pour in the seasoned blood and stir over low heat until it just begins to thicken, then stuff and poach briefly — faster, denser. Rice or bread crumbs are added by some Central American cooks; the Mexican dictionary and newspaper accounts do not list them.
Sourcing and gear. Blood: frozen pork blood from an inspected plant via Asian, Latin or Polish butchers, or a meat processor. Hierbabuena is spearmint; peppermint is too sharp. A thermometer in the poaching water is the one essential tool.
Still open. The origin of the word moronga is not documented. No Mexican commercial or family formula with weights has been compared against this one.
The photo. The photograph is tacos de moronga, the sausage fried and crumbled into tortillas.
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