The Great Charleston Blood Sausage Shootout! Let's Get Ready for a Blood Bath!

 

Get Ready, It's the World Cup of Blood Sausage

-Jesse Sutton

The Competitors: Clockwise, from the top: Boudin Noir from New York Butcher Shoppe, in Mount Pleasant, SC; Su Sabor Morcilla Argentina, from Supermercado La Mexicana, in North Charleston, SC; De M Tierra Morcilla Colombiana, also from Supermercado la Mexicana; Kishka from Euro Foods in West Ashley, Charleston, SC; and Konemann's Blutwurst, also from Euro Foods.

Background: I absolutely love me some blood sausage.  I've been fascinated with it from an early age.  I saw a picture of blutwurst in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, and I was absolutely transfixed.  I simply had to try it.  A sausage made of blood!  What could possibly be better?  (I was a weird kid.)

Anyway, sometime during cooking school, I finally got to try some, and it was everything I hoped it would be.  Porky, fatty, odd, and delicious!  Ever since, I was hooked.  I order it nearly every time I see it on a menu (or, to put it a different way, about 12 times in the last 20 years).  I took a sausage making elective at Kendall College and learned to make my own.  Then, when Hurricane Katrina had New Orleans temporarily shuttered, and I was bored in my parents' house outside Chicago, I drove around all day to different butcher shops, got all the stuff to make it, and made my own.  Here's a true-life quote from my wife to me, that day:

"Okay, here's what's gonna happen.  If you ever want me to eat anything you make, ever again, you're gonna let me stop helping you right now.  Then, you're gonna finish this, and clean the kitchen.  And then, you're gonna take a shower, while I clean the kitchen again.  Got it?"

The girl has a way with words.

Anyway, I'm a psycho for blood sausage (poor choice of words), but up until recently, it was really hard to find.  (Even harder to find fresh blood to make it, as I'm pretty certain it's not inspected for wholesomeness in SC, making it illegal to sell.)  So anyway, I was at NY Butcher Shoppe [sic] in Mt. Pleasant, which, despite the obnoxious spelling, is the best butcher shop in town, and lo and behold, they have boudin noir in the freezer.  I buy it, despite not having any kind of a plan of what to do with it.  A couple weeks later, I find morcilla from Colombia at my favorite Mexican grocery, out in Ashley Phosphate's highly Latin quarter.  A few weeks after that, I'm at Euro Foods, the Lowcountry's only slavic grocery, and run across some kishka.  Into my freezer it goes.  Within a week, I'd found the last two, one at the Mexican place, one at the Eurpean one, and the course was clear: I was going to have to have a shootout.

I grew up reading guitar magazines, and shootouts were a pretty popular review format.  They'd get a bunch of similar products together (distortion boxes, or electric guitars under $500, or something), and them try them out under identical circumstances, just to see how they did.  So here we to, Hot Dogs and First-Ever Shootout, the Blood Sausage Battle!

The Parameters: Each blood sausage would be tasted, one at a time, alongside a couple of logical sides (apple compote [made with my new favorite apple, the Cosmic Crisp, which are like gigantic Honey Crisps, but even sweeter], and roasted potatoes with caramelized onions, the way we used to do them at Jacky's Bistro back in the day, except no one is yelling at me.

Each sausage was cooked whole in its casing in a hot oven, and then sliced, except for the blutwurst, which was uncased.  For that, we cut slices and seared them in a dry non-stick skillet, to best capture the flavor without added ingredients.  We were as fair as possible.

We judged each sausage on 3 factors: flavor, texture, and X-factor (meaning any attribute that set it apart, but was unrelated to flavor or texture).  

The Panel: The sausages were tasted by myself, my wife D, and our buddy Mark, who is the sommelier of Peninsula Grill, and also the lead guitarist in an imaginary band we're in.  (It's just the two of us for now, but you'll see us in lights pretty soon.  Red and blue lights, most likely.). 

The Results

Disqualified (for not being blood-sausagey enough): De Mi Tierra Morcilla Colombiana.  It was black, like a real blood sausage, but it was tightly stuffed with rice, as well.  There also seemed to be more lean protein and less fat than a regular blood sausage.  Now don't get me wrong, the sausage was good, and I ate the rest of the packet happily throughout the week, but it just didn't have the flavor or texture of a true blood sausage.  The flavor was fantastic, redolent of cumin, and it made a nice addition to a saute of haricot vert and potatoes to serve as the base for a fish, but sadly, it was just not how we wanted to get down.  It was as if someone had brought a bratwurst to a hot dog contest.  Wrong show. 

Flavor: 3
Texture: 3
X-Factor: 5 

Final Verdict: A damn interesting sausage, but inappropriate in this contest.

Did Not Place: Kishka, from Euro Foods.  A Polish blood sausage, typically bound with barley and cooked tongue, this guy just didn't have much going on.  The flavor was flat, and the texture was firm (which isn't a problem in any other sausage, but with blood sausage, you expect a little unearthliness of texture).  Worst, it had no X-factor, whatsoever.  Just a boring link, all around.

Flavor: 2
Texture: 2
X-Factor: 0

Final Verdict: If it was the only blood sausage I could get, I would absolutely eat it, but there's just better stuff available locally.

Second Runner Up: Konnemann's Blutwurst, from Euro Foods.  This was an odd one.  I've never had a German blood sausage before, so I don't know if they're all like this, but this one fell victim to a squishiness of texture that one of our panellists (the one with boobs) found pretty off-putting.  I don't think Mark loved it much, either.  I thought it was FANTASTIC, but then, I'm also a huge fan of country pudding, the creepy, unearthly Southern-Haggis monstrosity popular at all the more downtrodden grocery stores in my area.  At any rate, we all agreed that the flavor was absolutely bonkers, even better than the boudin noir (more on this later), but the texture was just too porridge-y.  I decided to acquiesce to my panel-mates' opinion, because the loosey-goosey texture would have made this stuff a tough sell in a restaurant, and hard to use, besides.

Flavor: 5
Texture: 1
X-Factor: 3

Final Verdict: Absolutely delicious, but too squishy for all but very specific applications.  I want to make a shepherd's pie with it as the filling.  I would blow goddamn minds.  Just you wait.  They didn't understand Van Gogh, Frank Zappa, or the Unabomber, either.

First Runner Up: Boudin Noir, from the still-annoyingly-named NY Butcher Shoppe.  It was the platonic ideal of what blood sausage is all about.  The texture was firm but just a little pasty.  Soft, but firm enough to slice and griddle, if one so desired.  The flavor was mild but round and warm, full of those suble cookie-spice notes that boudin noir is named for, especially in Northern France, where they really know how to make it.  When an American, British, or French chef thinks of blood sausage, this was the closest to the expectation.

Flavor: 4
Texture: 4
X-Factor: 2

Final Verdict: Terrific, terrific boudin.  It's what you want, when you want a boudin.  It's gonna be hard to beat.  And, yet...

The Clear Winner: Sa Sabor Morcilla Argentina, from the ratty little tienda up on Ashley Phosphate!  Who knew?  The flavor was almost on par with the German and French entrants.  However, it had a magical trick up its sleeve that none of us saw coming.  The entire sausage was shot through with what could only be (to my palate) ground-up braised big skin!  See, the Italians (who settled Argentina in large numbers at one point) have a sausage called cotechino.  Those crafty Italians would boil pig skin, then cool it and grind it with the rest of their sausage meat.  It stretched the yield out, but it also had a magical secondary effect.  The sausage it yields has little, sticky, unctuous bits of gelatin-rich skin all through it.  This increases mouthfeel, especially when the sausage is sliced and griddled.  The stuff was just incredible.

Flavor: 4
Texture: 5
X-Factor: 5

Final Verdict:  Well, Argentina haven't been World Cup champs since the eighties, but they took home gold today.  No contest.  The stuff's incredible.  The only way you could possibly do better than cotechino or boudin noir, for my sausage dollar, is present me with a hybrid of the two.

This has been ridiculously rewarding.

-JS