Food Detective: There will be blood, but guess what? You’ll probably enjoy eating it

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A bit of carmelizing never hurt anything, including Chilean blood sausages (center). | Photo courtesy David Hammond

Updated: March 16, 2012 8:02AM

If you order your steak medium-rare, you’ve seen the watery pink pool on your plate that my mom used to call “juice.”

Chrissy Camba of Vincent told me “My family uses pig’s blood to make a Filipino pork stew called dinuguan. As I was growing up, they told me it was ‘chocolate meat.’ ”

People are sometimes afraid to call blood what it is.

If you’re planning traditional New Orleans chow for Mardi Gras, consider boudin noir. Blood tends to give food a “black” appearance, and like “juice,” and “chocolate,” “black” may sound less threatening than “blood.”

Many in this world aren’t shy about taking blood straight. The Massai of Tanzania tap a cow and take it warm, pre-coagulation; in the Arctic, the Inuit sip seal blood.

Though Islam and Judaism — the other two Abrahamic religions — forbid the eating of blood, many Christians symbolically consume it as part of the communion sacrament.

Most of us eat blood in some form all the time, and with the increased popularity of head-to-tail cooking, chefs are finding new ways to unabashedly serve up the nutritious liquid of life, and they’re putting it center plate.

Andrew Zimmerman at Sepia dishes out scallops with a blood pudding that delivers “earthy meatiness that helps ground the sweetness of the scallops.”

At the Bristol, Chris Pandel also follows the British tradition with an “English blood cake made with oats and pork blood alongside braised chanterelle mushrooms.”

Blood with earthy mushroom flavor is a winning combination, though Rob Leavitt of Butcher & Larder told me that blood-based food is “often showcased on its own for its mineral-y, iron-y quality.”

I’d always been a little standoffish with bloody menu items, wary of the plastic tubs of cubed and congealed pig blood on offer at Thai markets, hesitant to dip my spoon into a bowl of czernina, the duck blood soup found at Polish restaurants.

My wariness evaporated last summer in Chile’s Atacama desert, where I was wowed by grilled blood sausages that opened me up to this sometimes-disregarded ingredient. Browned over fire, served warm and toasty, this sanguine sausage was fantastic. As with frying, caramelizing anything is guaranteed to make it tastier. You almost forget what you’re eating.

David Hammond is an Oak Park writer and contributor to WBEZ (91.5 FM) and LTHForum.com. E-mail detective@suntimes.com.