Today’s lunch is sausage rolls. I made them with my own fair hand and I have to say, it was the best thing about my Tuesday.
A pair of sausage rolls
Here’s how to make them:
1 large onion, finely chopped
Salt and pepper
3-4 tablespoons of finely chopped herbs (I used chives and thyme, but sage, parsley, anything tasty goes)
450g sausage forcemeat
2 tablespoons ketchup
1 large cooking apple, finely chopped
1 pack of puff pastry
1-2 tablespoons melted butter
First you fry up the onion in a bit of oil with lots of salt and pepper for flavour until it’s soft and translucent.
Onions frying up nicely
Then you put the sausage meat in a big bowl and tear it apart with your fingers so it’s in small pieces. Then add the herbs, the onion, ketchup and the apple and mix it all together with your hands, not quite kneading it because it shouldn’t be tightly pressed, but so everything is amalgamated nicely.
Ready for rolling!
Roll out your pastry into a biggish square, without getting it too thin as it has to be sturdy enough to hold all the tasty things inside without letting them pop out, so about 2mm minimum thickness is good. Cut the pastry into broad strips, about 9cm wide and maybe 25cm long, like this:
To roll the rolls, put a tablespoon or so of the sausage meat on the end of the strip of pastry furthest from you, making sure that you’ve left a couple of mm space on each side to allow for the inside to squish out a little if it feels like it when it’s rolling.
About how much filling you should put on the pastry strip and where. It can go a bit further towards the edges than this. I fiddled with it after I'd taken the photo
Then you start rolling towards yourself as you would with a sushi roll, until you get to where the pastry is all the way around the meat and is about to meet on the other side of the meat. Then you dab a bit of water on the pastry that’s about to touch so it sticks nicely, finish the roll and cut it off.
At this point you brush some water on the flat bit to act as a sort of glue
Continue rolling with the next bit of the pastry strip. Each strip makes about two or three rolls. Brush each one with melted butter (I forgot to do this, but it makes them all nice and shiny, and more photogenic).
Then bake them in a preheated oven at 180C on a tray lined with silicone paper or dusted with flour for about 25-30 minutes, and then you have a whole tray of delicious sausage rolls. They go particularly well with chutney and cheese.