Today, I was present at a harvest of one of Eric's cows, because I want to do
nose-to-tail cooking while I am
gardening and renovating in Longview, WA.
I gathered up pots, pans, and bags for the harvest. We went out to the field and rounded up the
cattle.
I watched the cow that was chosen to be harvested get butchered. I thought it was pretty neat!
Right after the cow was shot and its neck split open, I collected the blood in two big shallow pans so that. Throughout the butchering, I was there with plastic bags to collect the offal as the professional butchers took the organs out of the cow. The offal and more that was collected was the kidney, liver, spleen, lungs, heart, tripe, blood, head, feet, and one stomach lining. I didn't take any pictures after we started loading the offal and blood into the truck, because it was all pretty rushed to make sure everything stayed good and got to the freezers in time.
The blood was my first priority, because I had not prepared a chest of ice for transport. To start off my foray into nose-to-tail cooking, I made black pudding (blood pudding) based off of this
black pudding recipe by David Bowers, but I did it with cattle blood instead. I had to make substitutions and omissions in the recipe to make do with what was available immediately in the pantry for the recipe. I had about twenty four cups of blood, so I ended up making the recipe eight times larger than it stated it. I split the making of the eight times larger recipe into two batches of four times larger. I had to omit
milk, since it wasn't available. I didn't have animal fat, so I used butter and olive oil for the first batch. Then, for the second batch I used ham stock instead of animal fat. I didn't have the spices listed, so I substituted with fresh sage, rosemary, and thyme. The first batch had oats, but I ran out of oats and instead used rice in the second batch. I didn't take any pictures during this process, because I felt time-pressured to get this made ASAP, because the blood was already halfway congealed. I had to smash up the congealed blood to make it happen. Here are some pictures of my cleanup and the resulting black pudding I made.
After I had set the black pudding, I tried my hand at skinning and butchering the cow head. It took me an hour to just get a little bit of meat off of one of the cheeks. The head, feet, lungs, and stomach lining will probably go back out for the coyotes to eat, because I was making too slow progress on the head that by the time I would have finished, I don't think it would have been good to eat. For reference, the head, feet, and lungs (because of their size) are in a much larger old freezer that kinda works and kinda doesn't, because the power strip's breaker keeps tripping. The rest of the offal collected had made it safely into a better freezer that works awesome! So, I still have a spleen, kidney, tripe, heart, and liver to cook with.
I sampled a little of each of my black pudding pans from each batch. Due to the way things poured out, each pan was a bit different from the other. I had made sure to split the stuff in the top of my mixing bowl with the stuff on the bottom of my mixing as evenly as I could. Overall, it ended tasting good in all of my pans, perhaps a little bland though. I think I could have added a lot more herbs than I did. It did come out just like pudding. It had gelled up quite nicely. The first batch (with oats) had a more jello/pudding-like consistency than the second batch (with rice). The second batch (with rice) had a texture I would describe more of as kinda stiff rice pudding.
Huzzah! I got lots of leftover black pudding that I will be putting in the freezer to eat over
the next couple of weeks (because I made
a lot of it)! And speaking of which, how do people like to eat their black pudding as leftovers? What ways of recooking it do you enjoy?
I am thinking I will probably want to read
The Complete Nose-to-Tail by Fergus Henderson to get a better idea of all the possibilities that I will have for cooking with an entire animal and so I can be better prepared next time.
What recipes would you recommend to me for the offal I currently have to cook with (for a low budget and resources kitchen)? (just about cattle)
What kind of nose-to-tail cooking do you all do? (any type of animal)
What are some of your favorite nose-to-tail websites, YouTube Channels, videos,
books, and recipes? (any type of animal)
EDIT: I did forgot to mention that we did take the tail and tongue, too.