Making Haggis

We looked around for recipes and cobbled together several to make haggis on Sunday afternoon. This post really isn’t about the recipe. It’s about the mechanics.

First you start with a trio of meats and a half pound of suet:

That middle one is a heart. It’s really weird having a heart in your refrigerator. When you realize you have to touch a heart, you pour yourself a Southern Tier IPA and get out the oats:

Then, you get the heart out of the bag and admire how clean it is and you silently thank whoever cleaned it for you because you know cutting out all those arteries and who knows what else would have icked you right on out:

We boiled the meats (beef liver, pig heart and veal sweetbreads) for about 1 1/2 hours. The house smelled like crap or death or something quite unpleasant:

But, then the house smelled better as the aroma of the toasting oats took over. Mainly I put this picture in so you could catch your breath if this whole post has made you ick out.

So, you probably think three organs cooking in a pot would be the worst. Then you must know that haggis is traditionally cooked in a sheep’s bladder or its bung. You can’t really get that around here. So we bought a Genoa sack from the Belmont Butchery. Like everything this was made in China (really):

With the skin sack cleaned, the better-half started the grind. Don’t worry if it looks like some jack-legged thing, everything is very clean:

The main meats went through and then the suet. To the bowl we added a mix of spices, the toasted oats and two finely shredded onions. The broth we saved from the boiled meats went in the mix to bring everything together.

The better-half held the skin bag open and I stood on a stool to spoon the mixture into the bag…the bag was 32 inches long and I needed the extra height to see into the funnel he was holding at the open end.

The haggis went into a really large pot of water and cooked for about 2 hours. The house really started to smell yummy.

The outer part of the sack started to split and we didn’t want to risk plucking the haggis out of the water with tongs thereby puncturing the remaining layer so we made a sling out of cheesecloth.

When I cut into the haggis, the surface tension rippled the skin back in a really magnificent way.

Then we stone cold munched. We have so much leftover haggis that I froze three quart bags of it. We had some for dinner last night and we have even more leftover that will go nicely with some baked beans later this week.