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Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

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    Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

    I went to the butcher today for a little bit of a different fare than you get at the supermarket, and they had some great stuff there....wild boar sausage for 1.49/100 grams, and BLUTWURST (blood sausage). i got 3 large ones for just over 2 Euro! I guess no one else wants it (I don't know why...in the South it's totally normal). Though my family is from the South, I've never made it (finding products made with blood and any other body parts isn't really easy in Canada), and I don't know how really. I read on the net that I should boil it, then slice it up and bake or lightly fry it? Or I was wondering if I should just slice it in rounds and fry it like black pudding (another blood sausage product, from Ireland/the UK).

    I also want to ask them at some point if they'll sell me straight up blood, but I don't want them to think I'm weird. They don't actually slaughter animals there because it's the middle of the city, but I'd like to make this polish soup that uses blood. Apparently in Scandinavia and Poland it's not unheard of to just go to the butcher and ask them for a bucket of blood, but not so sure about that here...

    At 5,90 a kilo though, I think blutwurst is going to start being my go-to for my iron deficient red meat cravings. Even chicken is only that cheap on sale!
    Last edited by DanieMarie; 16 Jun 2011, 03:45.

    #2
    Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

    I know you can go to butcher shops here in the American South and get a gallon jug of pig's blood if you want it, but that doesn't really help you much does it...it basically comes in a milk jug though. I don't know if they do the same for cows; I would say that the reason pig's blood is used because of the traditional way of slaughtering a hog, wherein you wind up with all of the hog's blood in a pan at the end of the process. I'm not sure if slaughtering a cow results in the same or not as I've never done it.

    Also, 5.90 euro per kilo of chicken? On sale? Cost of living in Germany must be ridiculous!
    "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
    -Thomas Jefferson

    Let a man never stir on his road a step
    without his weapons of war;
    for unsure is the knowing when the need shall arise
    of a spear on the way without.
    -

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      #3
      Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

      A kilo is more than two pounds, and I thought that was pretty cheap. It's a LOAD cheaper than at home (where you'll pay closer to $20 for a pack of chicken breasts)...and that price is for breasts, not whole chickens (you can get a small frozen roasting chicken for about 2 Euro). It's cheaper than pretty much all of Western Europe as well. In general, Berlin is considered to have some of the cheapest living costs in all of Western Europe (though also, the lowest wages so it evens out) and Germany has heavily subsidized food so it's much cheaper than most other places. I guess maybe it gets expensive compared to parts of the US, but it's all relative. It's like how at home in BC things are stupidly expensive even after the exchange, but people there earn a ton of money so it's normal to them. To give you an idea, minimum wage there is $8.75 an hour and that will get you NOTHING in cities like Vancouver or Victoria.

      It would be pigs blood here as well. In Germany they love their pork (one of my gripes actually...I don't like pork much unless it's in ham or bacon form). I'd prefer cow's blood (actually the soup technically calls for goose blood, but I KNOW that's not going to happen), but it will have to be pig.
      Last edited by DanieMarie; 16 Jun 2011, 08:21.

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        #4
        Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

        I've eaten such a wide variety of foods in my life that cooked blood isn't strange to me at all. I've had stews where blood has been used as a thickening agent, including a really good Hungarian goulash - but the texture of blood sausage/blood pudding just doesn't set well with my mouth.

        Out here, I occasionally see little tubs of pig's blood in w/the liver & soup bones. I think it's used in some Mexican or Philippino dishes, but I'm not entirely sure.
        The forum member formerly known as perzephone. Or Perze. I've shed a skin.

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          #5
          Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

          Maybe I should just suck it up and ask the butcher. But maybe later so they're not like "hey, who's that girl who keeps coming in asking for blood products?" The Hungarian Goulash sounds great! The Polish soup I'm thinking of has a lot of similarities with Borscht....it's got beets in it as well, but it has blood. And the reasons I really want all this stuff is twofold: 1) I just can't seem to get my iron levels up, 2) I weirdly like the irony taste it has (probably related to #1).

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            #6
            Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

            $8.35 (which what 5.90 euro exchange to) will usually get you one of those big packages of chicken breasts that you're talking about here (you know, the huge family size ones with 10-12 pieces in it), but that's the normal price, not the sale price, and that's for a brand new package and not for the older ones, because as the expiration date gets closer they lower the price. Might be because we're closer to the source where I am.

            Also, I'm probably revealing how much of a hick I am with this, but if you need goose blood...you could always just go find a goose and kill it. That, or have a hunter friend do it for you. I'm sure they hunt goose there, and it would just be a matter of draining the the goose's blood into a container while dressing it.
            "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
            -Thomas Jefferson

            Let a man never stir on his road a step
            without his weapons of war;
            for unsure is the knowing when the need shall arise
            of a spear on the way without.
            -

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              #7
              Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

              Kinda a problem with that:

              I live in the middle of a city of 3.5 million. I don't know where on earth I'd find a goose to start, where I'd kill it, and how I'd manage to do it without getting in deep caca here (you have to have a license, etc, etc, etc to hunt here, and it's VERY VERY strict). Or even how I'd manage to kill it, because I don't own a gun and neither does a single other person I know. As for a "hunter friend", lots of those in Canada, absolutely none here (too much red tape, not enough actual animals to bother!)

              Sorry, not trying to be pissy...just explaining that I live in a very different world...in Canada it would be a perfectly good suggestion, even in more urban areas. it's weird. People here aren't so squemish about eating stuff like liver, blood or basically anything, but they're not so big on the hunting. Canadians aren't so squemish about actually killing animals but they wont eat their "by product" parts (I wouldn't even question being able to get blood at a butcher in Canada...I just don't think I could. Maybe.....MAYBE in Chinatown). It's also just not easy to get a gun over here. In Canada it's already a lot stricter than the US, but it's lax compared to here. In Germany, you can only get a gun after you get a gun license, and to get a gun license you have to have a hunting license, which involves an exam, courses, etc, etc. And if you got caught poaching (basically, killing anything without a license) it's big, big trouble....

              ---------- Post added at 10:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:46 PM ----------

              PS $8.35 for a pack of 20 chicken breasts?????????? The $20 I quoted from back home wasn't for a large pack of them, but for a pack of 3-4 large ones. So I thought 5.90 for an entire kilo was freaking awesome. How are you guys sooooo lucky??????????

              Are veggies cheap there too? Just curious!
              Last edited by DanieMarie; 16 Jun 2011, 12:53.

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                #8
                Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

                Originally posted by DanieMarie View Post
                PS $8.35 for a pack of 20 chicken breasts?????????? The $20 I quoted from back home wasn't for a large pack of them, but for a pack of 3-4 large ones. So I thought 5.90 for an entire kilo was freaking awesome. How are you guys sooooo lucky??????????

                Are veggies cheap there too? Just curious!
                Not all of us are so lucky. Here in Las Vegas, I'm paying about $4 a pound for chicken breasts (and that's including bones & skin at a relatively inexpensive grocery store. If I want boneless/skinless I gotta do it at home. I'm not paying $15 for 4 puny chicken breasts when I can get 6 or 7 w/bones & skin for the same price) I can get chicken breasts for about $3 a pound if I buy the flash-frozen bagged chicken breasts w/added frozen mystery basting fluid.

                Decent tomatoes have been $4 a pound for a long time.
                The forum member formerly known as perzephone. Or Perze. I've shed a skin.

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                  #9
                  Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

                  I can get frozen boneless/skinless in the bag for about $6, a whole chicken for about $4, and organic chicken from a local farmer for twice that, and fresh, free range, local, organic eggs for $4 for 18


                  ...but what I really love is the seafood I LOVE SCALLOPS!!!! $9 for a tub of giant bay scallops!! (that is good)
                  Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of HistoryPagan Devotionals, because the wind and the rain is our Bible
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                    #10
                    Re: Cooking with blood (not for the squemish)

                    Originally posted by thalassa View Post
                    I can get frozen boneless/skinless in the bag for about $6, a whole chicken for about $4, and organic chicken from a local farmer for twice that, and fresh, free range, local, organic eggs for $4 for 18


                    ...but what I really love is the seafood I LOVE SCALLOPS!!!! $9 for a tub of giant bay scallops!! (that is good)
                    Ahhhhh JEALOUS! That's what's affordable back home...seafood. Being on a coast, it's cheap and fresh because the ocean is right there. Here, you can only get frozen and mediocre, slightly old (but not dangerously so), and expensive. Sometimes, I swear I'd do anything for some proper mussels, scallops, clams, or sockeye salmon!

                    ---------- Post added at 08:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:22 AM ----------

                    Originally posted by perzephone View Post
                    Not all of us are so lucky. Here in Las Vegas, I'm paying about $4 a pound for chicken breasts (and that's including bones & skin at a relatively inexpensive grocery store. If I want boneless/skinless I gotta do it at home. I'm not paying $15 for 4 puny chicken breasts when I can get 6 or 7 w/bones & skin for the same price) I can get chicken breasts for about $3 a pound if I buy the flash-frozen bagged chicken breasts w/added frozen mystery basting fluid.

                    Decent tomatoes have been $4 a pound for a long time.
                    Yeah that sounds more like closer to what things cost back in BC. I never bought the frozen mystery breasts....I can't eat anything that has any additives. I think fresh chicken is even a bit more expensive. I don't know if I shopped at the "right" places though...might be cheaper at like superstore or costco, but because my friends all live downtown there's only Thrifty's and once we drove to Save-On (Thrifty's is a more expensive but higher quality supermarket, Save-On is middle...they have good deals but they don't just go for the bottom line all the time either).

                    I think it would be expensive here too without the subsidies. Both Canada and the EU have pretty strict meat farming regulations and ban growth hormones and antibiotics, so they can't really "mass farm" them the same way as in the US (if they kept that many chickens together, they'd just die naturally).

                    Overall, veggies are WAY cheaper than meat as well. 4 Euro (and I'm not doing the exchange, because from personal experience, currency is relative...what costs $4 is more equal to 4 Euro than the exchange, and differences are more due to the cost of living and not exchange rates), anyway 4 Euro per KILO (which is over 2 lbs) would be unreasonable for tomatoes here....at the height of summer they're usually 1.50-2 per kilo (depending on the quality and where you buy them). When I went back to Canada last june I wanted to cry, because strawberries cost like $4 a pound or something, and they'd been significantly cheaper in Berlin when I left. I spent like $20 on a tub of yogurt, some strawberries and I think it was a box of crackers (I remember it was one other thing). I was like WTF??? But people do earn more there, so I guess they don't notice.
                    Last edited by DanieMarie; 16 Jun 2011, 22:33.

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