Back when I thought it was OK to eat bits of animals I used to like black pudding (while trying not to think too much about what it was made of). So I was pretty happy to find this on the supermarket shelf this week…

I had heard about this product before, but had never seen it for sale. I picked it up in Booths in Keswick (Cumbria, UK). The ingredients are interesting – black beans, some grains, spices and vegetable fat, and on balance it’s relatively healthy.

It didn’t stay in my fridge very long, I cooked it up the next day. It sliced really nicely, and I threw it in the pan with some tomatoes…

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Black pudding is of course normally part of a cooked breakfast. So, despite eating it at lunchtime, I had it with some toast, baked beans and something resembling scrambled egg. The scrambled ‘egg’ was made from chickpea flour, black salt, turmeric and nutritional yeast. It wasn’t that great to be honest, I would normally have made a tofu scramble but didn’t have any in.

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The Verdict

It was good! The look and texture was spot-on, and it cooks just like normal black pudding. I would have liked it to be a little bit more flavoursome – a few more spices would have been great – but that was nothing a good squeeze of ketchup couldn’t fix. I don’t often shop at Booths (there isn’t one near where I live), but next time I’m there I’ll definitely buy some more.