Cook Your Own Sausage Rolls With This Butcher’s Easy Recipe

If you are stuck at home and do fancy getting a little creative, here is a very simple recipe for making your own sausage rolls.

Richard Vines

27 Dec 2020, 01:43 PM IST

Cook Your Own Sausage Rolls With This Butcher’s Easy Recipe

An employee uses tongs to remove a sausage roll from the counter. (Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- My late mother always insisted on buying sausage rolls over Christmas in case anyone dropped by. This year, there isn’t much dropping by in London, where new coronavirus rules severely restrict mixing, other than the kind you do with food in the kitchen.

So if you are stuck at home and do fancy getting a little creative, here is a very simple recipe for making your own sausage rolls. It worked for me at first go, which means almost anyone anyone should be able to do it.

It’s supplied by butcher and restaurateur Richard H. Turner, who last week shared his recipe for scotch eggs. Today’s recipe is also based on one that appears in his book “Hog, Proper Pork Recipes From the Snout to the Squeak,” published by Mitchell Beazley. The book also contains recipes for the pastry and the sausage meat, both of which I bought in.

I enjoyed the simplicity of the recipe but I am not sure I particularly like prunes. Part of the fun of trying it could be to choose your own favorite fruit. (OK, strawberries and bananas might not work, but cranberries, apricots or apple might).

Ingredients:

850 grams (30 ounces) sausage meat

100g fresh breadcrumbs

1 teaspoon fresh sage, finely chopped

800g of puff pastry

1 egg, beaten

50g chopped prunes (optional)

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (356 Fahrenheit), gas mark 4.

Place the sausage meat in a mixing bowl and add the breadcrumbs, 100 milliliters (3.4 fluid ounces) of water and sage, mix with your hands until evenly blended. (The chopped prunes should be added at this stage if you are using them.) Set aside.

Roll the puff pastry out to approximately 40 centimeters (16 inches) x 25cm.

Work the sausage meat into an even, long roll and place along the length of the pastry.

Brush the exposed pastry with egg, then roll over and crimp the join together with a fork.

Cut into 4 sausage rolls, brush the outside with more egg, place on a baking sheet and cook for 45 minutes.

Serve warm.

Richard Vines is Chief Food Critic at Bloomberg. Follow him on Twitter @richardvines and Instagram @richard.vines.