Rob Gentile, the chef at Buca, an ambitious Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto, had a problem. Everything he knew and believed about cooking told him that he shouldn’t waste a single edible bit of the whole hogs he brought into his kitchen, and so he’d demanded that his pig supplier send along the blood with Buca’s weekly order. But Mr. Gentile tried making crêpes with it, and they didn’t taste interesting enough, he said. He made sausage with it, and those didn’t grab him either. The blood was piling up.
Then, last March, Giuseppe Marchesini, Buca’s manager and sommelier, called his mother in Basilicata, who called her mother, who passed along her recipe for torta di sanguinaccio, a traditional southern Italian pastry commonly eaten in the run-up to Lent. The result is a showstopper of a dish. It combines fresh figs steeped in grappa and espresso with satiny buffalo-milk crème anglaise, chopped, candied almonds – and at its base, a dense, decadent (and not-at-all bloody tasting) dream of a custard that’s made from a mix of dark chocolate and slow-tempered blood.
“At first, with the blood tart, people were shocked,” Mr. Gentile said. “They thought we were crazy.” Now they can’t seem to get enough. When Mr. Gentile briefly took it off the menu earlier this summer (it’s not exactly a hot-weather dish), his customers complained. Mr. Gentile has also added a dish called spaghetti al nero di maiale, for which he tosses blood-blackened noodles with rapini, crumbled ’nduja sausage, garlic and burrata cheese. That pasta is almost indecently good.
Though Mr. Gentile’s intention wasn’t to jump on a trend, those two creations are part of a wave of not-your-usual blood dishes turning up on influential menus in Canada and the United States.
At the Black Hoof in Toronto, chef Brandon Olsen recently debuted a savoury blood custard flavoured with rosemary and topped with pickled pears. Every week, he buys 16 litres of fresh blood from his butcher and freezes it in one-litre batches.
Does Mr. Olsen get squeamish at all? “I enjoy blood,” he answered. “I think blood is a great vessel for culinary expression. When I look at The Learning Channel, at all those surgery shows, that’s when I get squeamish. But working with animals, no.”
At DNA restaurant, a cutting-edge kitchen in Old Montreal, chef Derek Dammann serves panna cotta made from cream, cocoa, black pepper, lemon peel and pig’s blood. He sometimes does blood soup, and blood pasta, too.Chris Cosentino, the star chef at Incanto, an offal-focused restaurant in San Francisco, does a chocolate blood pudding garnished with Bing cherries. Other U.S. chefs use it to enrich dark Swedish rye bread or Finnish blood pancakes, which are called blodplättar, and are typically served with preserved lingonberries.
Just yesterday, Rene Redzepi, the chef at Copenhagen's Noma, which is arguably the best restaurant in the world, posted photos showing cauliflower and other vegetables marinating in pig's blood.
At Cook It Raw, a symposium of many of the world’s most innovative chefs in Lapland last year – the sort of clubby, invitation-only event that most chefs can only read about with awe (Mr. Redzepi is a fixture at the annual event) – one team presented a dish of cappelletti pasta stuffed with reindeer blood. And Food Arts, an industry-focused culinary magazine, made a long essay about blood the cover story of its July/August issue (the cover photo, unfortunately, looked more like an outtake from CSI Miami than your usual food porn).
There’s a very good chance, in other words, that your dinner is about to get bloody.
