You will need a meat grinder.

A few weeks back I got an e-mail with the title, “Abroyles (Addie Broyles) referred me”.  It was from Jack Yang, the owner of eatinginabox.com, a food blog based around making bento box lunches with a theme.  It turns out that Jack and a friend of his had gotten a hold of some real haggis during a trip over the pond to London.  It had been a while since they had enjoyed the traditional Scottish dish, and Jack was looking for the needed ingredients to make their own haggis.

My response follows:

I’m more than happy to help out someone referred to me by Addie!

I have some good news, and some bad news. We’ll go with the bad news first.

I spent a long, long, really long time trying to find sheep stomach.  I ended up buying a 5 pound box of stomachs in Weatherford, TX.  I suppose that’s actually a good thing as I’d happily give you two or three or eight of them.

The actual bad news is that the other parts might be a bit tougher to scare up in a short period of time.  I usually head up to Dallas to my preferred lamb/sheep offal provider in Richardson TX, Zituna World Market. The problem is that I call my order in two or three weeks in advance. You can always try calling all of the halal meat markets in the local area to see what they have on hand. It’s possible that they might have everything you need, minus the lungs as they are illegal to sell in America due to Anthrax concerns.

Or if you could possibly wait a week, I need to make haggis myself, so we could make a joint venture of it. I happen to have all of the legal parts needed to make haggis, I even have some lamb brains I could throw into the mix to liven things up a bit.

Jack was game for a haggis making party, and the next weekend he showed up with potatoes and rutabagas in tow to make the necessary “neeps and taters” one would expect to find on a plate with ground up lamb innards, onions and toasted oatmeal that was boiled in a stomach.

True haggis calls for using the pluck, which should include the heart, the lights (aka the lungs), the windpipe, the liver and some of the intestines.  As I mentioned above, buying sheep or lamb lungs in America is illegal due to Anthrax concerns so sadly we had to do without.  Finding the windpipe was also not in the cards, so to make up for the lack of parts kidneys were added to the liver.

Before we got to cooking, I filled a big bowl full of water and started soaking the lamb stomachs.  This is done to help clean off any extra unwanted debris.

A lot of salted water was added to the innards pot, which we brought up to a boil and then back down to a simmer.  For two hours the bits needed to cook, so Jack and I talked about our cooking experiences, inspirations–Alton Brown brought Jack and his wife together–and the differences between tech bloggers like ourselves and PR bloggers.  It’s always good meeting new people, but it’s even better when you make a new friend.

For some reason I completely forgot that I also had lamb hearts, so we ended up boiling them separately in another pot full of salted water until they were properly cooked.

As the pots bubbled away, Jack made quick work of a few onions, chopping them perfectly as we talked.

Once everything had finished cooking, I got off my butt and got to work chopping the hearts, livers and kidneys into smaller chunks that we could feed through the grinding attachment on my Kitchenaid mixer.

Since I had never used the grinding attachment before, Jack took the reigns and began feeding the meat through.  Mr. Henderson specified that the guts should be coarsely ground, so coarsely ground they were.

The recipe also called for “prepared suet”.  After a small discussion we decided that grinding the suet would be best for mixing.  My poor little Kitchenaid mixer is a bit low on horsepower, so the tougher suet really strained its limits.  There was a bit of worry that the mixer wouldn’t make it through alive, but it huffed and it puffed and it managed to grind the suet and not turn into a smoking pile of rubble.

Jack jumped on the onions he had cut earlier and sauteed them until they were nice and soft.  At the same time I dropped two pans of pin head oatmeal into the oven to toast.  Once the oats started to emit a nice roasty scent, we knew it was time to combine everything together.

There was so much of every ingredient that we ended up using my large stock pot to mix the meat, toasted oats, onions and suet.  Vast quantities of allspice, salt and pepper were added.  Boiling things tends to deaden the flavor of food, so the extra spices were needed to counter that loss.

The stomachs had soaked for long enough, so it was time to start stuffing them.  We had to sort through the stomachs to find a few good ones as many of them had holes in the worst places.  Jack and I rolled our sleeves up and got to stuffing.  It was a messy job, but it had to be done.

Stuffing completed, we tied off two of the stomach pouches with butchers twine.  Jack was significantly better at tying than I was, and I wish I had let him tie off all of the stomachs.  Not done forgetting things, I had blanked on the fact I needed to use the extra lamb brains I had saved from the last time I made a brain recipe.  We mixed the brains into the remaining haggis mixture and stuffed another stomach.  This actually was perfect, we’d get to try haggis with and without brains to see which was superior.

The haggises (haggisi?) completed, we wrapped them all in foil…

… and dropped them into pots of boiling water.  The haggis trio needed about three hours of simmering so we lowered the heat a bit and wandered into the living room to watch a movie while we waited.  My friend Laura showed up for the festivities (she even drew a comic of the outcome).  She was the only person brave enough to come despite our various invites to other friends.  I wonder if they all really did have emergencies at the last minute, or the idea of actually eating haggis was just too much for them.  Either way, it was great having one more foodie point of view.

The three hours up, it was time to remove the haggises from their watery environments.  I only scalded myself a little bit pulling them out of the pots, but it was worth it.  As you can see there at the bottom of the haggis, the mixture did burst out a little bit, but the everything turned out just fine.

A quick two slices in the traditional method revealed the perfectly cooked meat and oatmeal.  We all started taking little pinches of haggis since were all so hungry. I knew we had succeeded when the only person that had eaten real haggis, Jack, declared that it was very similar.  As I’m trying my best to make these recipes as close to the book as possible, that’s the biggest complement I could receive.

Here’s a plate filled with haggis, neeps, taters and a dollop of Dijon mustard.  The haggis tasted to me like a livery, meaty oatmeal, and it worked perfectly with the root mashes.  Most interesting was the fact that if I added even a little bit of mustard to a spoonful of haggis, it would completely mask the liver flavor. If you get a chance to try haggis, make sure you have some Dijon mustard handy as well. The allspice was almost a non-factor despite the monumental amount we added.  The haggis made with brains didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped, and everyone agreed that the texture was off.  I think it was the extra moisture that the brains brought to the table was to blame.

Getting back to the original haggis, here’s Laura’s take:

And, sorry to say it, I found the filling incredibly reminiscent of canned dog food (I worked for 4 years at a dog kennel, so I have tasted my fair share of dog food). Now, it is a good-quality canned dog food, but dog food all the same. It had a rich meaty flavor, but a bit strong in the liver taste (not quite to my preference). But, when you eat it with just a dab of Dijon mustard, the liver taste was cut drastically and it was quite tasty. Plus, it was served with mashed rutabagas, which were incredibly delicious!

Jack has written up his own post on the event, which you can find here.  It was a real honor working with him, and we’ve already talked about getting together for more culinary adventures.  I can’t wait!

There was tons of work finding the ingredients and making the haggis,  and I’d be lying if I told you that I’d be game for doing it again anytime soon.

I’ll leave you with one of Scotland’s most famous sons, Robert Burns and his Address to A Haggis.

One down, eighty to go.

Address To A Haggis

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace
As lang’s my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’ need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An’ cut you up wi’ ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn,
they stretch an’ strive:
Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve,
Are bent lyke drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
“Bethankit!” ‘hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him ower his trash,
As feckless as a wither’d rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro’ bloody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ legs an’ arms, an’ heads will sned,
Like taps o’ thrissle.

Ye Pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
Gie her a haggis!