French Boudin Blanc Sausage Recipe - Homemade White Sausage

Boudin blanc is a fresh white sausage made with finely ground meat, cream or milk, eggs, starch and spices: delicate, moist and nothing like a standard pork banger. The meat can be pork, a pork and veal mix, or chicken, each giving a slightly different texture and richness.

There are two distinct traditions worth knowing about. The French boudin blanc, the original, is refined and cream-heavy, with aromatics like nutmeg, white pepper and sometimes truffle. It's a classic of Alsatian and Burgundian cooking, traditionally eaten at Christmas. The Cajun boudin blanc of Louisiana is a different beast entirely: rice-filled, heavily spiced, and closer to a dirty rice stuffed into a casing than anything you'd find in a Parisian brasserie. This recipe is firmly in the French camp.

This sausage has always been my white whale, my Moby Dick. I've eaten exceptional boudin blanc at some very good restaurants and spent a long time trying to replicate it at home. The challenge is that the recipe varies so much, region to region, chef to chef, and it genuinely rewards patience and attention to detail. After a lot of trial and error, this is the version I keep coming back to.

Please take a look at how-to-make-sausages, how-to-cook-sausages and the-science-of-great-sausages. These guides will apply to all the sausage recipes on this site and will provide you with a great primer!

• 350 g skinless chicken breast, chopped
• 3 slices bread  
• 5 tbsp milk
• 2 pinches of salt
• 4 egg whites
• 180 ml double cream
• 40g foie gras
• 6.5 g Black summer truffle, grated
• Pinch cloves
• Pinch nutmeg
• Pinch fresh thyme
• 1 meter hog casings

• Freeze the chopped chicken breast for about an hour (we are going to put them in the food processor and don’t wan’t this to heat them up too much)
• Soak about 1 meters of hog casings in warm water
• Tear the bread up and pour over the milk, so that it soaks it all up
• Place the chopped chicken breast and process until finely chopped (about 5 seconds)
• Add the whites and blend, it will first look like a liquid, and then will thicken up slightly. Stop once it has thickened (about 10 seconds)
• Add the milk soaked bread,  the foie gras, salt, truffle, cloves, nutmeg and thyme and process for another 5 seconds
• Add in the cream and process until a mousse forms.
• Stuff the mixture into the hog casing, twisting off 6 inch sausages
• Add these sausages to a pan of cold water
• Cover the pan with baking paper so that all of the sausages are submerged and heat slowly to 80c, and then hold them at this temperature for 20 minutes
• Remove the sausages from the pan, and dry with kitchen towel before pan frying gently in lots of butter