Right, you lot! I need Black Pudding!!!!!!!

[Kermit power]

Meat, as we all know unless we're members of some weird, deluded sect, is wonderful stuff.

However, it's also quite expensive stuff, and as my salary is looking like taking something of a nose dive this year, we are looking to be a little more economical in the kitchen.

As I'm not prepared to compromise by eating intensively reared meat, I need cheaper free-range-meat-based delights. Fortunately for me, or so I thought, I adore Black Pudding, especially with beans and toast.

I've just got back from visiting the three butchers I trust within a reasonable distance. All of them can tell me all about the farms where their meat is sourced from. They can all tell me about the provenance of any sausages they don't make themselves. But can they get me a free-range Black Pudding???? No. They cannot.

I can find some free range Black Pudding online, but they tend to either have delivery charges twice the price of the actual pudding, which defeats the economy object in the first place, or they have large minimum order values.

Does anyone have any cunning ideas on where I can get free range black puddings at a sensible price?

[Kermit power]

sherman said:

As black pudding is made from the bits of animal that you don't want to know about, a pile of spices and blood, what's the point in it being free range? You wont be able to tell the difference after all the spices mask the flavour of the minced meat.

I'm not buying free range because it tastes better, or at least not exclusively, anyway. I buy free range for ethical reasons.

As for "the bits of the animal you don't want to know about", there aren't any, really. I'll quite happily tuck in to the stomach, pancreas, testicles, brains, hearts, livers kidneys and various other wibbly-wobbly bits of various animals, just so long as I know they've had a decent life before they get slaughtered.

[Kermit power]

bitwrx said:

I give you.......


Intensively reared pork.

I give you intensively reared pork

That's the problem with intensively reared animals. For every farm you can find where the pigs have an apparently reasonable life, you can find another where they're crammed into pens like those in the video.

If you can tell me how to identify the degree of intensive used in the intensive farming which produces any old black pudding I pick up off the shelf, then please do. Until then, I'm not going to be buying produce from the farm you showed, because I've got no way (given that I can't actually visit the farm) of knowing it's not actually from the farm in the video, or one like it.

[Kermit power]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Outstanding!

Assuming they can be frozen, half a dozen would be good.

[Kermit power]

N Dentressangle said:

Do these guys:

http://www.realmeat.co.uk/index.html

have a shop near you?

They do, but unfortunately, they don't do Black Pudding!

[Kermit power]

bga said:

Kneetrembler said:

WRONG, If you have ever had Morcillo de Burgos you would not have made that comment as it has none of those items that you mention in it.
In particular it has rice in it and it certainly is not sweet.
It is normally cut in very thick slices and served plain grilled

The morcilla they sell in the Mercadona where we stay definitely has spices in it. It is a bit sweeter than the black pudding we get in the UK but have never had any with raisins though

There's your problem right there - Mercadona! There were "raisins" in it, but they were mechanically recovered raisin pulp used for mass production.

Get down to the gastronomía section of El Corte Inglés for the proper stuff. That doesn't have raisins in it either. It has whole grapes. And little edible people who turn them into raisins in your mouth, just before you chew, so you get the visual appeal of the grape coupled with the taste sensation of its little wrinkled cousin.

Probably.