TV & Showbiz

Legendary Bury Black Pudding reveals secrets – including powdered blood

Well, who knew.

Daisy Jackson - 22nd February 2025

Bury Black Pudding is one of Greater Manchester’s most famous and excellent exports, creating a breakfast staple that puts the borough on the culinary map. 

This familiar sight on a full English breakfast has been being made using a traditional time-honoured recipe for generations. 

And while this delicious blood sausage might not be to everyone’s tastes, Bury Black Pudding is the king of them all. 

It’s the leading brand in the UK, with a gold medal-winning recipe dating back more than 100 years, and has a whole variety of flavours including chilli, gluten free, vegetarian and white pudding varieties. 

Recently, Bury Black Pudding revealed some of its secrets, allowing the BBC unprecedented access into its factory in Bury for an episode of Inside the Factory. 

The series, hosted by Paddy McGuinness and Cherry Healey, went beneath the surface of this heritage brand, from production all the way through to packaging. 

Viewers have been stunned to learn what goes into Bury Black Pudding, and it really isn’t as much of a bloody mess as your imagination might’ve led you to believe. 

In fact, most of the ingredients are cereals – only 5% of it is blood. 

And the blood in the blood sausage? It’s powdered. 

In the episode, production director Richard Morris (who has worked for Bury Black Pudding his whole life, following in his grandfather’s footsteps), said: “There’s no big tubs of blood.

“To actually transport it, it needs to be dry. And there’s also no bacteria in it, so we can use this over a 12 month period.”

Inside every delicious slice you’ll also find oatmeal, pearl barley, rusk, onions and pork fat.

Another surprising thing is the sheer size and volume of the black puddings before they’re portioned and packaged for our homes. 

A 600kg batch will make about 3,000 black puddings, with the mixture added to a vacuum filler before being pumped under high pressure into recyclable plastic casings. 

Hundreds of these tubes are cooked into a steam oven for an hour and 20 minutes, then sliced into the black pudding we recognise in an ultrasonic slicer. 

3,000 sticks a day, five days a week, are sliced up for the shelves into around 120,000 slices.

Speaking of the opportunity to appear on Inside the Factory, brand and marketing manager Matthew McDermid said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase the heritage and passion that goes into making our black pudding. 

“We are incredibly proud of our history and our role in bringing this traditional product to consumers, we can’t wait for the nation to see how the UK’s leading brand of black pudding is made.”

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Featured image: The Manc Group