00:00 Is it tasty? Or is it nasty?
00:06 This component of a full English breakfast can be one or the other, but hardly in between.
00:12 Black pudding, made from the finest blood.
00:14 So this is our traditional black pudding ring. It's filled into animal intestines. The mix
00:19 itself is like almost a brownish chocolatey mix.
00:24 But it takes a bit more to make it right.
00:27 The very first question should be, why do the Brits even eat a pudding made of blood?
00:32 In fact, black pudding isn't a real pudding, but a kind of blood sausage. And it's been
00:36 eaten for centuries.
00:37 I've lived a long life eating black pudding, so I know what it's all about. And it's really,
00:42 really tasty. And a breakfast isn't a breakfast without a black pudding.
00:45 There's some onions in there. There's some oats maybe of some nature. It's got quite
00:53 a distinctive taste to it.
00:56 Black pudding is known and consumed all across Britain and Ireland, but especially in Northern
01:01 England it's a tradition. And the town of Bury, just north of Manchester, is a black
01:05 pudding nerve centre.
01:07 People come from all over. They come for coach trips. And they come in here with their bags.
01:11 And they've got the black pudding just sticking out of the bag. And you're like, wow, you've
01:14 travelled far. Yeah, yeah, you know, I've come from Scotland or from Yorkshire or anywhere.
01:19 And they'll come here just to buy the black pudding.
01:23 The Bury Black Pudding Company ships the sausages all over the world as far as Hong Kong, Singapore
01:28 and Abu Dhabi. Richard Morris shows how the specialty is made. Fresh blood is not actually
01:33 used for it.
01:35 We use dry blood. It's dried in a very similar manner to coffee. Into that we also have our
01:40 seasoning. That seasoning is a blend from my grandfather's days over a hundred years.
01:45 So that's our tradition. The aroma on that is beautiful.
01:48 For centuries, blood from a fresh slaughter has been worked into various dishes so as
01:53 little as possible of the animal would go to waste. The other ingredients of black pudding
01:58 are crumbled rusk, onions, oatmeal, barley and pork, sheep or beef fat.
02:05 A lot of black puddings out there are about 20, 25 percent fat. We have three percent
02:12 fat. We don't mince any fat into our products at all. Every piece of fat is what you can
02:16 see.
02:17 The dried blood and spice mixture is poured into a blender and water is added in. Then
02:23 come the remaining ingredients, some of them pre-cooked.
02:30 So the barley you saw upstairs when we got it in the nets, it cooks up to three times,
02:37 three and a half times the size. So that's it after it's been cooked. So it swells up
02:42 like rice does, but it needs that fluffy texture. So it's how we cook it. I'm keeping that secret.
02:49 Once all the ingredients have been mixed together, the raw black pudding mass is stuffed by hand
02:57 into the intestine.
03:01 It's a traditional thing that's been going on for hundreds, two hundreds of years. There
03:06 is no machine in the world that links black puddings. We do it as humans and we create
03:11 that, which is the very black pudding.
03:14 The sausages found in supermarkets all over the world are stuffed into casings of plastic.
03:19 This gives the black pudding a longer shelf life.
03:22 I have a massive connection with black pudding. It's been in my family for all my life. My
03:29 granddad's, it's my granddad's recipe. Where he got that from, I do not know. He's probably
03:34 been passed down generations, even from 17th, 18th century when the monks brought black
03:39 pudding to the Northwest.
03:43 As the last step, the black pudding is boiled. To make sure it takes on just the right color,
03:48 it has to be moved around almost constantly while it cools.
03:55 It lets the air get to the product. So what you find the product then, it has small pressure
04:03 points here, but with the air contact, you see that's grey, that will go black. So if
04:08 I keep moving them and moving them around, the whole product is in even black.
04:14 Black pudding is a British and Irish specialty. But what sets black pudding apart from other
04:19 kinds of blood sausage?
04:21 A lot of black puddings are more like sausage meat, quite firm. I know the Germans are very
04:27 much like that. It's that bratwurst sort of snap and bite. Ours is quite creamy to the
04:32 palate. So in the Northwest of England, if you chew it more than three times, it's known
04:38 as gristle.
04:40 Black pudding is really not to everybody's taste. So which team are you on? Team Yummy
04:46 or Team Yucky?
