How to Cook Haggis

(Happy Burn's Night everyone).

This is just a little bonus post just in case any of you are eating Haggis tonight and would like to save yourself some time, fuel, money.

There is a running joke in our household which surfaces whenever I am recipe developing and something gets a high approval rating from the family. “Can we have this every week?” started out many moons ago as a serious request, but of course when you spend as much recipe developing and testing as I do, making random meals on a weekly basis just can’t happen and I tell them so. So now it is asked as a way of paying a compliment, but I know if it is followed up with a “maybe fortnightly?” they are serious. To my surprise, a few years ago haggis was one of the things which my lot pestered to be allowed into the rotating repertoire. The repertoire is closer to monthly, not weekly, but this is a compromise which everyone is just about OK with.  

It is proper comfort food, isn’t it? Rich, offaly, but not overwhelmingly so, with a light, crumbly, pleasingly consistent texture – and the sides help too. The favourite way to eat it is with neeps and tatties. We don’t always eat it this way, just in winter as it is ridiculously rich. Potatoes are cooked with their skins on, smashed not mashed and slathered with salted butter. The butter melts and pools into potatoey crevices which is very nice indeed. And then carrots and swede are crushed, not mashed with lots of butter and white pepper added. Then there will be greens, lightly steamed and yes, you’ve guessed it, dressed with more butter.

Sometimes we just have Haggis and greens, or haggis with crushed carrots and swede. But tonight we are having everything. And it will all be cooked in the pressure cooker. This is because it takes a long time to heat through a haggis conventionally – the one I usually buy says 75 minutes in the oven. So this is much, much quicker. And if you cook it in the same pot as the carrots and swede, and perhaps even the potatoes if you have room, you are doing a 3 in 1 cook which is saving a quite incredible amount of time and fuel.

This recipe is for an average sized haggis to feed 4 which is around 400g. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but see above, it is very rich. We also like Haggis leftovers in our house, so if I buy a bigger one (I have a 2.3kg one), I cook it on its own as it does take a bit longer – 30 minutes as opposed to the 200 minutes in the oven recommended on the packet. But generally, with things like Haggis (and cuts of meat), it is less about the weight and more about the diameter. If your haggis is one of the very fat, round ones, you might want to cook it for longer to give the pressure cooker time to penetrate right the way through. If it is quite slender, the shorter cooking time is fine.

And finally before I get onto the recipe – a tip about swede which can come under the “hard to prep” category. I have found that if I buy swedes way in advance of when I plan to eat them and leave them out, they do start to soften and wrinkle and far from being a bit past it, are at this point much easier to peel and cut up. And as while this is happening, they are gradually losing water, it means that there is less likelihood of your diced swede shooting out water when you try to mash it. I think we’ve all had this happen even after steaming swede.

I have made the potatoes optional as not everyone will have a deep enough pressure cooker for this. You can cook them separately of course instead. But if you have one of those folding stainless steel steamers which open out, you can use one of those instead of a steamer basket and trivet and this will give you much more space to play around with. Just make sure that the water doesn’t cover the base of it - you don’t want the potatoes sitting in water as they will start to disintegrate. Don’t worry, there will still be enough liquid to maintain pressure.

Haggis with Neeps and Tatties

Ingredients to serve 4:

1 haggis, meat or vegetarian version (around 450g), removed from the fridge an hour before cooking

750g floury potatoes, cut into large chunks (optional)

1 medium swede, peeled and cut into 1cm dice

500g carrots, sliced

As much butter as you like

Put 1cm water in your pressure cooker and add the trivet. Put the steamer basket on top. If you have room for all three, add the potatoes, followed by the swede then the carrot. fill with the swede, followed by the carrot. Wrap the haggis loosely in baking parchment and place on top of the carrot.

Close the lid, bring up to high pressure and cook for 15 minutes. Allow to drop pressure naturally. Remove the haggis from the pressure cooker. Unwrap and pierce (my favourite bit). It will have swollen up slightly to a tautness which makes this very satisfying, as it will split and the filling will gently burst out. Make sure the haggis is piping hot. There has been a rare occasion when it hasn’t - perhaps because it was fridge cold when it went into the cooker. If this happens to you, just rewrap and put back in the pressure cooker for another 5 mins HP fast release. And take the vegetables out first.

Transfer the swede and carrots to a bowl. Add as much butter as you like and plenty of salt and white pepper and mash roughly. You want it crushed, not pureed, so don’t overdo it. If you have cooked the potatoes as well, roughly smash and dot with butter.

You need nothing more with this than a big pile of greens. I go for Brussels sprouts tops or kalettes or perhaps spring greens.