A taste of blood
Is it the next frontier in whole-animal cuisine?
“People think of blood as being strong and
livery, but I don’t find it to be that. ... When
you eat blood pudding, it’s milder by far than
foie gras or paté.”
Paul Canales of Duende
Like most hematophages, I began eating blood before I knew what was on my plate — or rather, squeezed between two halves of a crusty blond bun.
For a few dozen francs, the street carts whose meaty smoke ensorcelled Belgium’s public squares would hand over a fat, smile-shaped black sausage called boudin noir. The color, reminiscent of a crushed blackberry or the inner rings of a bruise, was more alarming than the curd-like insides, whose deeply savory flavor was haunted with a subtly sweet note.
It was only after I’d eaten a few, over the course of a year as an exchange student, that someone informed me that boudins noirs were primarily stuffed with breadcrumbs and blood.
Twenty-five years later, as I dipped my spoon into a bowl of boat noodles at Zen Yai Thai in San Francisco, I wondered: Is it possible to divorce blood from its origins?
Certainly, with the boat noodles it’s possible to ignore the dish’s most dramatic-sounding ingredient. Fat rice noodles intertwine around halved meatballs and Chinese broccoli in a lush, sweet-spicy broth whose puce color comes from a few spoonfuls of blood stirred in at the end of cooking. The dried chiles and the green onions scattered over the top, the hint of acidity in the broth, even the curls of pork crackling garnish attract the most attention. But for a hematophage like me, the underlying richness that the blood contributes to the flavor is the reason I return to them.
Taboos against eating blood exist in some cultures — animals slaughtered according to both Jewish and Muslim dietary laws are fully bled after they are killed — but the shiver of disgust with which many Americans respond to the thought of eating blood is a contemporary reaction.
In the foodways of our parent cultures, blood is often a special-occasion dish. Across Europe and Asia, the slaughter of a pig resulted in hundreds of varieties of blood sausages, pancakes, soups and braised blood, most prepared on-site, when this perishable and nutrient-dense part of the animal was at its freshest. The blood of smaller animals generally wasn’t wasted, either. Duck blood could be stirred into soup. Rooster blood finished a classic coq au vin. The sauces for jugged hare and civet of deer were — and still are — enriched and thickened with blood.
Ask American butchers and cooks, and you’ll find blood can simultaneously be a hard and an easy sell. It’s a connoisseur’s ingredient, its lavish, earthy flavor adored by people who have grown up with it or encountered it on their travels. Yet the word “blood” on a menu revolts others.
Yes, animal blood is a potent reminder of death, a fact many omnivores like to wish away from the prime rib on their plate. Slaughter now happens in closed, distant plants, not our backyards. Even animal butchery on television is considered obscene. Blood is gross, unless it’s highly stylized and sexualized as vampire fodder.
This emotional distance has allowed our reaction to blood to blossom into visceral aversion. The thought of consuming animal blood can make us flash on the memory of a cooking knife slicing through a finger, or concrete scouring away a patch of skin.
Blood is the visible symbol of pain.
The next frontier
Blood may also be the next frontier of the whole-animal butchery movement, which has ranchers, butchers and chefs concocting novel uses for less familiar cuts of meat. (Warning: If you are susceptible to queasy spells, skip the next three paragraphs.)
According to AnnaRae Grabstein, director of operations for Marin Sun Farms, which now operates a U.S. Dept. of Agriculture-inspected slaughterhouse in Petaluma, the vast majority of the blood is sent to tallow collectors, which process it for agricultural uses such as blood meal. “I would definitely love to see all our blood find a home in a kitchen,” she says .
With a little advance notice, customers can order blood at Marin Sun Farms’ two retail stores. (The most frequent orders to date come from Basque cooking clubs in Marin County.) Its origins will have been carefully tracked back to an animal raised on a small, sustainability-minded farm.
After an animal is killed, Grabstein explains, “We control the possibility of microbiological contamination by using a special three-bladed knife and hose to make sure blood flows directly from the animal into a jug, but doesn’t come in contact with the hide.” The jug is quickly chilled or frozen, set aside until USDA inspectors examine the carcass and clear it for sale.
Aaron Rocchino, co-owner of the Local Butcher Shop in Berkeley, says that his shop often has pork blood on hand, gathered from the same hogs local farmers sell him.
“Some people like to turn it into charcuterie, which is also what we use it for,” he says. “Other people buy it to supplement chocolate in brownie recipes.” Some of his customers use it to feed their roses or marijuana plants. One customer — a follower of the Paleo diet, Rocchino thinks — claimed to have made gelato with it.
That’s not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.
In 2013, Noma restaurant’s food lab in Copenhagen released a report chronicling its experiments with blood. The laboratory’s cooks found that the proteins in pig blood and chicken eggs share similar characteristics. They substituted blood for eggs in recipes for meringues, sponge cakes and, yes, ice cream (a ratio of 65 grams of blood per egg, if you’re curious to repeat the experiment).
Noma’s blood-baking experiments may come across as avant-garde, but “Duck, Duck, Goose ” author Hank Shaw has documented his experiences making blutnudeln, a traditional German pasta that uses pork blood in place of eggs or water.
Not surprising, offal champion Chris Cosentino, chef-owner of San Francisco’s Cockscomb, has cooked blutnudeln and has also served an Italian blood-chocolate pudding for dessert. He’s made blood cakes, blood sausage, blood soup, even a cake of cured, aged blood he calls “bloodtarga” (after bottarga, cured fish roe) that he shaves over pasta and salads. “Blood is super mineral-rich,” Cosentino says, “and has a unique flavor profile.”
The California Retail Food Code gives restaurants no particular requirements for cooking blood, provided it came from an approved supplier such as a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse.
What is more important for cooks is to choose a source that reflects how you will use the ingredient. Chefs who frequently make blood sausage, for example, stress that you must buy blood with no anticoagulants, or else the sausage will not hold together properly.
Chinese and Vietnamese groceries such as New May Wah on Clement sell coagulated blocks of blood to cut into cubes and then braise. By contrast, Manila Market in the Excelsior, like other Filipino markets, sells liquid blood for use in stews. The anticoagulant may be as simple as vitamin C.
A complex ingredient
Those of us who love the flavor can agree: Blood is rich stuff.
After spending several weeks circling the Bay Area and consuming more blood than a mutant bat, it became clear that blood is by flavor as well as tradition a special-occasion food.
Sometimes the ingredient’s mineral, organ nature can become quite intense, as with the Cantonese blood cubes stir-fried with yellow chives that I ate at New Gold Medal in Oakland’s Chinatown.
It was easier to relish the custardy texture of the blood in a bowl of congee, or floating amid the pork and beef in the Vietnamese noodle soup bun bo hue. Cookbook author Andrea Nguyen argues that blood is a modern addition to the spicy soup, a cheap substitute for more expensive pork hock and beef shank.
More often, blood operates like fat, quietly amplifying the flavor of ingredients it is combined with. “People think of blood as being strong and livery, but I don’t find it to be that,” says Paul Canales of Oakland’s Spanish-inspired Duende, who compares the blood cubes I’ve been eating to straight shots of Tequila. He himself prefers a mixed drink. "When you eat blood pudding, it’s milder by far than foie gras or paté,” he notes.
ies, he stuffs piquillo peppers with a currant-sweetened fresh morcilla, and slices a long-cured version seasoned with garlic and three kinds of pimentón for his charcuterie plates.
Dishes like Zen Yai’s boat noodles show off blood’s delicacy. Others, like dinuguan, its opulence. There’s a reason that many Filipino restaurants — and parents of wary Americanborn children — call this offal-andblood stew “chocolate meat.”
“The best ones,” says the Attic chef Tim Luym, “have a hearty stew-like consistency with some weight to the blood, a nice but mellow vinegar tang, a little heat from the chile, some bitterness from the blood, and hints of garlic and sweetness from the onion and pork.”
Cafe Colma’s dinuguan meet all his measures. The stew, indeed the color and thickness of a melted Hershey’s bar, is seasoned with just enough vinegar to mask any overtones of iron. The acidity fades just as the carnitas-like flavor of the braised meat reveals itself, as if it peeked around a door before entering the room.
Dinuguan is a dish meant to eat in small spoonfuls, or ladled over a big bowl of rice. A stark description of its contents might cause some complexions to pale, but the appeal, once tasted, is hard to deny.
Blood sausage shows up on Spanish, Korean, German, Swedish, Argentinian, French and Hungarian-Japanese menus across the Bay Area. At Duende, where Canales makes multiple variet- Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @jonkauffman.