Week Four – White Pudding

For some reason, I ate fish food at a party on Saturday evening.  You would think that this would be an interesting food first – significantly more interesting than my three other food firsts of 2013 so far.

Well, it would have been interesting, but for the fact that I had already eaten fish food on a couple of occasions previously.

Strange?  Well, yes.

I doubt many people have eaten Tetra Fin before, but, as my mum works in a pet shop, I have a strange list of animal feed conquests – ranging from consuming a variety of dog biscuits (cardboardy) to licking pigs’ ears (hammy)… I imagine you’ll be disappointed to hear that I drew the line at pizzles (bull penisy, no doubt).

The upshot of this was that I had to find something a little more conventional to eat for this week.

So, here goes…

White pudding was this week’s foody treat.  The fact that it is Caucasian equivalent of black pudding was my only real knowledge of the product.  And that was something I just made up, so doesn’t, in any way, count as knowledge or indeed as a fact…  So, basically, I knew nothing about white pudding – The thing I was about to unwrap, cook and then eat.

Helpfully, the packet provided me with a list of ingredients: –

• Cured pork (32%)
• Pork (88%)
• Pork fat (8%)
• Salt
• Oatmeal
• Water
• Onion
• Various E numbers

Wait a minute… My maths isn’t great, but adding up all those percentages suggests that this particular white pudding was made up of 128% pork.  How is that possible?  That’s meat and a half…  Well, just over meat and a quarter, but you know what I mean.  Meaty.

Careful slicing was a must…

I sliced it up, fried it for a bit, only setting the smoke alarm off once, and lovingly presented it on a plate.

As you can see, years of watching MasterChef and the like have had no effect on my food presentation skills.

It looked just like mini beef burgers.  I like burgers, so was ready to take a bite…

But what did it taste like?  I pretend to hear you ask.

White pudding tastes like crunchy, oaty pork – Which is logical given the ingredients.  The crunchiness, however, may have been my fault for over-cooking.

I actually liked it, which was surprising.  I really don’t like black pudding and I had always just assumed that this would be the less blood-filled equivalent.  It was clearly not.

As an aside, I once accidentally ordered a black pudding pizza in Cologne – On this occasion, my GCSE German had severely let me down – and it was a particularly unpleasant eat.

Blutwurst pizza? Hmmm, that sounds like eine gute Idee… Not!

Well, that’s week four survived and I have found something else I might just eat again – And that’s just what this is all supposed to be about.

And the Michaelin Star goes to… White Pudding

Please suggest anything you think I should try in a future week…