Soondae (Korean Blood Sausage with Glass Noodles)

Soondae is the Korean blood sausage you buy steaming from a market stall, sliced into coins and eaten with a dish of salt, or simmered into sundae-guk, the pork-bone soup. A pig’s intestine is stuffed with pork blood, sweet-potato glass noodles (dangmyeon), glutinous rice, a little minced pork, chopped vegetables, garlic, ginger and scallion, then steamed. The diagnostic detail is the noodle: next to a European blood sausage it is springy, mild and light, because a good share of the body is starch noodle and sticky rice rather than blood, fat and oats. That noodle is also younger than most people think. The stuffed intestine is old in Korea — the 1809 Gyuhap chongseo has a beef one, and a late-Joseon cookbook, the Siuijeonseo, prints the first pork ‘doyaji sundae’ with pig blood, bean sprouts, radish, tofu and kimchi — but Korean food historian Joo Young-ha dates the glass noodle to the late 1960s, when it made soondae cheap enough to become everyday food. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from the Siuijeonseo’s ingredient list, the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture’s description and modern Korean market practice, and it is untested.

Ingredients

FILLING (2,300 g / 5 lb), % of filling

• 600 g (1 lb 5 oz) fresh or thawed pork blood, from a licensed source — 26%
• 200 g (7 oz) dry dangmyeon (sweet-potato glass noodles), cooked and chopped — about 600 g cooked — 26% cooked
• 180 g (6⅓ oz) dry glutinous (sweet) rice, soaked overnight and steamed — about 300 g cooked — 13% cooked
• 350 g (12⅓ oz) ground pork shoulder — 15%
• 250 g (9 oz) napa cabbage or mung-bean sprouts, blanched, squeezed dry and chopped — 11%
• 100 g (3½ oz) scallions, finely chopped — 4%

SEASONING

• 30 g (1 oz) garlic, minced
• 12 g (2 tsp) ginger, grated
• 25 g fine salt (about 1.1% of the filling; taste and adjust)
• 15 g (1 Tbsp) soy sauce
• 20 g (1½ Tbsp) toasted sesame oil
• 4 g (2 tsp) black pepper, fine
• 20 g (3 Tbsp) toasted perilla-seed powder (deulkkae garu), optional

CASING AND SERVING

• About 3 m (10 ft) cleaned pork small intestine (chitterling-grade), or 32–35 mm hog casing
• 1 small dish of salt mixed with gochugaru and ground sesame, for dipping

Directions

Key ingredients

Black Pepper · Soy Sauce

1. In the collection: the dipping salt is ordinary Salt stretched with chilli and sesame; Soy Sauce and a little Black Pepper season the filling. The glass noodle is the same sweet-potato dangmyeon as in Japchae (Korean Glass Noodle Stir-Fry). The European comparison in the collection is Irish Black Pudding.
2. Get the blood right first: buy pork blood from a butcher or Asian grocer that sells it for food, fresh or frozen, and keep it cold. If it has started to clot, whisk it and pass it through a sieve; lumps will not bind. Blood is the most perishable thing in the kitchen, so it is the last ingredient to come out of the fridge.
3. Cook the starches: boil the noodles 6–7 minutes until fully soft, drain, rinse cold and chop into 1 cm (½ in) lengths. Steam the soaked glutinous rice 25–30 minutes until tender. Both must be cooked before they go in: the sausage only reaches about 75 °C inside, which sets blood but will not soften a raw noodle or raw rice.
4. Mix: combine noodles, rice, pork, cabbage or sprouts, scallion, garlic, ginger, salt, soy, sesame oil, pepper and perilla powder. Pour in the blood last and stir until every strand is coated dark red and the mix is loose and wet, like a thick batter. If it is stiff, the blood will not reach the centre; add a splash of water.
5. Taste — the decision point: fry a spoonful in a dry pan until it is set and brown all through, then taste. It should be lightly salty and savoury, with garlic and sesame in the background. Under-salted soondae tastes flat even with the dipping salt; adjust now.
6. Stuff loosely: tie one end of the intestine, fit it over a wide funnel or a 20 mm stuffing horn, and spoon or push the filling in. Fill to about three-quarters full — the rice and noodles swell and the blood expands as it sets — and tie the other end. Make 40–50 cm lengths and tie each into a loose ring.
7. Steam gently: steam, or poach in water held at 85–90 °C / 185–195 °F, for 30–40 minutes. Prick any air pockets with a needle as they appear so the casing does not burst. It is done when the sausage reads 71 °C / 160 °F in the centre and juice from a needle prick runs clear brown, not red.
8. Slice and serve: rest 5 minutes, then cut into 1.5 cm coins with a sharp knife. Serve hot with the dipping salt, slices of boiled pork liver if you have it, and kimchi. Leftovers keep 3 days refrigerated; re-steam, or simmer in pork-bone broth for sundae-guk, or stir-fry with vegetables and gochujang.
9. Sibling recipe: make Irish Black Pudding once and taste the two side by side — the oat-and-fat European loaf against the noodle-and-rice Korean sausage is the clearest lesson in how much the filler decides a blood sausage.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. There is no single canonical modern formula. The ingredient set follows the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture’s description of soondae and the late-Joseon Siuijeonseo ‘doyaji sundae’ (pig blood, mung-bean sprouts, minari, radish, tofu, napa kimchi), brought up to the modern market version with dangmyeon and glutinous rice. Deviations: (1) the proportions are a working balance, not a published standard; (2) tofu and kimchi from the Siuijeonseo are left out — add 150 g pressed tofu and 100 g squeezed chopped kimchi for the older style; (3) a 32–35 mm hog casing is offered because cleaned pork small intestine is hard to buy in the US; (4) the cooking temperature is set by US guidance for blood and pork, not by tradition. Untested.

Where soondae came from. Korean cookbooks record stuffed intestines well before the blood sausage: the 1766 Jeungbo sallim gyeongje fills a cow’s intestine with beef and seasoning, and the 1809 Gyuhap chongseo, by Lady Yi Bingheogak, fills a beef intestine with beef, chicken and pheasant — no blood. The word sundae and the pig’s-blood version appear in the Siuijeonseo (late nineteenth century; some historians date the surviving copy to the 1910s). A widely repeated story makes soondae a Mongol field ration carried in during the thirteenth-century invasions; it has no documentary support and is best treated as folklore. The glass noodle is the big modern change. Joo Young-ha, the leading Korean food historian, dates dangmyeon in pork soondae to the late 1960s and says that is when it became working-class food: the noodle replaced costlier meat and vegetables. Some English sources put the change straight after the Korean War; the late-1960s date is the better-sourced one.

The name. Korean reference works derive sundae from Manchu senggi duha, ‘blood intestine’. It is repeated often and is plausible; the linguistic case has not been seen in a primary source. In romanised Korean it is usually spelled sundae, which is why searches return ice cream.

Variations. Abai sundae, from Hamgyeong in the north (now associated with Sokcho), uses the large intestine and more meat and rice. Byeongcheon sundae, from Chungcheong, uses small intestine and more vegetables. Ojingeo sundae stuffs a squid; dongtae sundae stuffs a whole pollock. Sundae-guk is the soup: soondae, offal and pork bone broth, seasoned at the table with salted shrimp and perilla powder. Sundae-bokkeum is soondae stir-fried with vegetables and gochujang.

Sourcing and gear. Korean and Chinese grocers sell frozen pork blood in tubs and dangmyeon in 500 g bags. Cleaned pork small intestine is sold frozen as chitterlings; it still needs turning, scraping and several rinses. A wide funnel works better than a stuffer — the filling is wet and full of noodles, and a piston stuffer smears it. A steamer basket large enough to hold the rings flat matters more than any other piece of gear.

Still open. No published figure for the blood share of modern market soondae has been found; the often-quoted ‘10–15 percent blood’ has no source. The Siuijeonseo’s proportions are not given in modern units. The Mongol-ration story has no primary text behind it.

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