Salad of Black Pudding with Poached Egg

Originally, this was going to be a post about Black Country beef stew but I’m afraid that the London weather put a stop to that. Last week was unusually warm, roasting hot even. Armed for the stew with some excellent Bury style black pudding, procured from Borough market, I returned home to a kitchen that felt like the inside of a baker’s oven. A hot, steamy bowl of stew was definitely not what the doctor ordered. So, after a quick flick through the pages of Gordon Ramsay’s Great British Pub Food, I came across this recipe for a nice salad of black pudding with poached egg, something a bit more in keeping with the weather!

Black pudding, or blood sausage as it is know to our American cousins, is one of my favorite foods. I love it fried to a crunch as part of a full English breakfast, or made with rice as in the Spanish morcilla. For this recipe, Ramsay says to “make sure you use a good-quality pudding. Individually made small black puddings have a much better flavour than those mass-produced ones”. The puddings I found from Sillfield Farm, a free range producer of rare breed pigs based in the Lake district, looked just the job. You can see them below along with the other ingredients of eggs, salad leaves, parsley, very good olive oil and some cider vinegar.

The recipe for the salad is part of the cookbook section on “starters”. I was far too hungry for that, so I decided to up the recommended portion size to make it into a bigger main meal. First of all, I put on a large pan of water to boil and then chopped the black pudding. I cut the pudding into four and then cut each piece again lengthways.

I then poured a thin layer of olive oil into a hot pan and added the puddings to fry. They would take about 4 or 5 minutes on each side. In the meantime, I got on with poaching the eggs. I must admit, I’ve always had a bit of kitchen fear when it comes to poaching eggs, but I followed Ramsay’s tips and things seemed to work out just fine. First of all, I cracked an egg into a small ramekin dish. This would make it easier to slide the egg into the pan without it breaking or becoming too spread out as it falls into the boiling water.

I then added a slug off vinegar to the pan and turned the heat right down so that the water was at the gentlest of simmers. If the water is boiling too furiously it can easily upset the egg whites. Next, I swirled the water with a spoon to create a whirlpool effect in the middle and then gently slid the egg into the centre.

The egg sat poaching for about 3 minutes, which should be enough time to make sure that the white is set but the yolk is still runny in the middle. Using a slotted spoon, I lifted the egg out and onto some paper towel before patting it dry.

Success!! I repeated the process for a couple of more eggs, this time poaching two at the same time. By now the black pudding was about ready, with each side nicely browned and the edges crispy.

To assemble the salad I first arranged a good handful of the lettuce onto a large plate. After letting them cool for a minute or two, I took the black pudding pieces and crumbled them over the salad before scattering on top a handful of the leaves picked from the parsley. I sat the eggs on top and drizzled over a simple dressing made from 3 parts olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar and some seasoning. A final grind of fresh black pepper and the salad was done. You can see the finished dish below, served with a nice cold bottle of Weston’s Premium Organic cider.

The verdict? Well, the salad was very tasty, the creamy egg yolks and crispy yet rich black pudding worked together well. The slightly sweet cider was the perfect accompaniment. I have to admit that it was a little too rich to eat as a main course and I would have been better leaving the serving size smaller, as the cookbook suggested. By the time I was halfway though I was pretty much done! Still, a perfect and simple little starter that I recommend you try yourself.