Give it a quick rinse.
And let’s see what this little beast weighs – 4.4 pounds!
When I wrote out the recipe and calculated the amounts, I knew that if I made the full recipe I would end up with almost 10 pounds of haggis. This would be a little crazy, even with guests to help chow down, so I cut the recipe in half to make it more manageable and it’s still a lot of food.
Now it was time to sew it shut. Closing the casing can be done in a few ways; tied off tight with a loop of butcher string, cinched with a metal clip as you would see on sausage rolls (also called hog rings), or sewn shut. I have hog rings but none that are large enough to fit around this casing. Tieing the end uses more casing than sewing so I sewed it to allow the maximum amount of casing available for expansion. See, the next step is to place the haggis into a pot of water and simmer it for 2-3 hours and all those oats soak up the stock and water and swell, so there needs to be enough room in the casing for this to happen without it bursting from too little space. I ordered just one beef cap, and was happy to see on the package label that it holds between 10-15 pounds of filling. So when I cut the recipe in half, I also cut the beef cap in half and hopefully it won’t burst in the next step.
Wow this thing is tough! I’d better use some pliers, so off Samantha goes to grab a pair. The thickness and toughness of this casing is closer to leather than chicken skin. I used the largest yarn needle we have which was just right to thread the butcher string through. Pliers made sewing much easier.
Here it is, the first seam sewn shut. After shifting the filling to create two sides, I cut it in the middle to further size down this little beast for a haggis that’s more reasonable for one meal – 2 of them, each around 2 pounds. I had two more ends to close, so it took some time and everyone was bored by then and left me on my own. So this is the last picture from the first stage of work. Here are the two haggises, or is it haggi?
This took about 6 hours to get to this point, a little longer than I expected. I didn’t prepare the meal to serve this until later, so they were wrapped up and put into the freezer until the 17th when I will be serving the full meal with the two standard side dishes; neeps and tatties!
(neeps=mashed rutabaga, tatties=mashed potatoes)
