7 Bizarre Cuisines Made With Blood Around The Globe

Eating blood: It’s not just for vampires! It’s been a culinary mainstay all over the world for as long as there have been humans. Many cuisines utilize blood, a rather bizarre ingredient, to cook dishes dear to the culture.

Variations of blood sausages and blood soups are quite common in Europe. Pig or cattle blood is allowed to coagulate under heat and turned into sausages using fillers like ground meat, fat, rice, bread, and barley. The Tuscan Biroldo is made with pig’s blood and offal and spices such as star anise, cinnamon, nutmeg, and fennel, while a sweeter version with pine nuts and sultanas has its origins in Pistoia.

Here are 7 Bizarre cuisines made with blood whose unforgettable flavors will make eating blood seem not so crazy after all.

1. French Coq au Vin

If you want to go the traditional route when it comes to France’s coq au vin, get ready for lots of chicken blood. This dish calls for an old rooster, red wine, mushrooms, garlic, bacon, and plenty of other appetizing ingredients. Back in the day, when people were living an entirely farm-to-table lifestyle (there were no other options), fresh chicken blood, rather than flour, was the main thickening agent used in coq au vin. Flour is mainly employed these days as fresh chicken blood isn’t as easy to come by as it used to be.

2. Blood sausage

Also known as black pudding is a sausage made with blood and any number of other ingredients like meat or cornmeal. (Not to be confused with haggis, which is Scottish sausage made with lamb heart, liver, and lungs.) If you cook the blood long enough, it will coagulate when it cools. Blood sausage is made all over the world. In Spain it’s called morcilla, in France it’s boudin nor, and China it’s xue doufou.

3. Sunjiguk, South Korea

Blood has found its way into the world of hangover cuisine in South Korea. Sunjiguk is a type of haejangguk, which means hangover soup, that uses coagulated pig blood as its main ingredient. The pudding-like texture of blood cubes can scare away some, but their unique taste can surely make them come back.

4. Thai Boat Noodles, Thailand

In this dish, blood is added to the noodle soup, which gives it a darker colour. They generally use pig blood, although sometimes duck or a goose blood is used too. So next time you’re travelling abroad and are served a noodle dish with a thick and a dark broth, you know you’re drinking blood!

5. Finland’s Blodplattar

When you think of pancakes, chances are you don’t think of blood. Well, unless you’re from Finland or Sweden. In both of those countries, there’s a dish commonly known as Blodplattar, which is basically a pancake made using pork blood. The blood is whipped to give it a thick consistency, mixed with flour, molasses, onion, and a few other spices, then cooked the same way you’d make any other pancake. The finished product is an iron-rich pancake that’s often served with sweet fruit jam or syrup or rolled like a crepe. It may not sound like a great breakfast to you, but it’s fairly common for people in both those countries.

6. Filipino Dinuguan

If you decide to try dinuguan in the Philippines, you’ll be diving into a stew of pork simmered in swine blood. This spicy stew is usually made with viscera (intestines) or offal (inner organs), mixed with blood and vinegar. It’s then given some fiery zest with a helping of skinny siling mahaba chilis. While this pile of stewed blood and organs isn’t for the gastronomically fussy, anyone who does partake will have his or her daily protein needs more than met after downing a heaping bowlful of dinuguan.

7. Blood Tofu, China

Tofu is such a staple of vegetarian and vegan cuisine that the two often seem to go hand in hand. That being said, it isn’t always so. In China, cooks take blood and coagulate it into a solid that looks exactly like a dark red or gray tofu. This is a traditional dish, made with chicken, pig, duck, or other animal blood, and is often served as “black” tofu with noodle soups and other dishes. The texture is similar, though the flavor is strong, and it’s supposed to be nutritious and medicinal, so it’s actually pretty common in China. Because of that, if you’re vegetarian and you order a tofu noodle soup, and the tofu looks a little dark, you might want to ask a few questions before chowing down.