Newfoundland Grillers Smokers & Boil-Ups Guild How To: Make Fresh Fish White Puddings
The Shed-Headz Crew have been getting fresh fish white puddings made using our own fresh caught cod, at a butcher shop in CBS. They are fantastic for breakfast or an easy backwoods boil-up especially when paired with beans in molasses. We've been searching for this recipe for quite awhile, even tested a couple, but this one is pretty well spot on. Note: We used fresh cod fillet and added salt to the ingredient list. You can also use watered salt cod and not add additional salt.
Minimum 2-hours before: Soak the natural hog casings following the package instructions. If the product you have uses different directions, follow those instructions.
Using the standard grinding plate in your meat grinder, grind together cod & onions. Mix together separately the dry ingredients, breadcrumbs, savory, salt and pepper. Finally mix together ground up fish, onions, suet, dry ingredients and 1 cup of water. The water is needed to get the mix through the stuffer, if your mix is dry add up to one more cup of water but don't overwater.
At this point we did a test fry mainly to check for salt flavor as the original recipe called for salt fish.
Now it's time to stuff, collagen casings are not recommended for these puddings so Bassan picked up natural hog casings from our local sports shop, Outdoor Pros.
(stock photo) We used my 5lb sausage stuffer to fill the casings. The hog casings were quite difficult to get onto the horn compared to collagen casings, but they filled just fine.
Next you're supposed to loop and twist the puddings into links, our initial batch was overwatered and delicate so we coiled them and performed the next step in full lengths.
Next you place the whole string of links into a stockpot of water to cook 15-17 minutes. Do not let the water exceed 190ºF or the puddings may burst.
After placing in a bowl straight out of the pot, the puddings were placed on cooling racks for about an hour.
Bassan refrigerated the puddings overnight, then cut & vacuum sealed them the following day. Using this recipe as posted at the top of this article you should have good results. The original recipe called for twice as much suet and twice as much water. The extra water made the puddings hard to stuff and cook, the extra suet made them unpleasantly greasy. Other than that they are fantastic, hence our revised recipe.
When we cook them, we dice the puddings about a 1/2" thick and brown them up in a frying pan for an outstanding addition to any meal.
Cheers, Mike
Copyright © 2011 Michael Smith
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