Sausage Rolls

sausage rolls

September 29th, 2011

It was Fiona’s birthday yesterday and she invited a group of friends to her home for drinks and snacks. I thought I’d take something simple that would survive a long bike ride – sausage rolls.

wild boar sausages

I always hated sausage rolls as a child, along with cheap supermarket sausages. Somehow I knew that there had to be something out there that had a decent flavour. A really simple way to make gourmet sausage rolls is to use homemade pastry and buy a good filling. The easiest way to obtain good sausage meat is to buy quality sausages (from your trusted butcher) and cut the skins off.

Using my favourite pastry (recipe here) and a dozen wild boar and apple sausages, I made 29 bite sized sausage rolls.

pastry

Make the pastry at least half an hour beforehand, so that it can rest in the fridge – chilled pastry rolls better. Roll the pastry out on a lightly floured board until it is about 1/8th of an inch thick. Trim the edges, so that they are square. Don’t throw away the excess pastry, you’ll get another two or three rolls out of it.

rolling

Remove the skin from the sausages and make a horizontal row, as per the picture above. I got two and a half sausages into each row.

rolls

Roll to pastry over the sausage meat, leaving about a half an inch of extra pastry to overlap and cut it off. Brush the overlap with some beaten egg and stick the pastry together, so that the sausage meat is wrapped up.

ready to bake

Cut into bite sized sausage rolls, with a sharp knife and add a couple of slits in the top of the pastry to let any hot air escape. For extra decoration I pricked the pastry with a fork.

egged rolls

Brush the sausage rolls with the remaining beaten egg and bake them in a preheated oven at 220º C for about half an hour (or until golden brown).

baked

I didn’t let my pastry get too brown, so that they could be reheated without burning, chez Fiona.

tomatoes and garlic

Fiona cooked a batch of tomatoes and garlic,

tomatoes in the blender

which were blended

tomato soup

to make a thick tomato soup.

mackerel paté

She also made the most fantastic mackerel paté and I will be begging her for the recipé!

jamón serrano

Fiona’s sister arrived with a lovely piece of Jamón Serrano (Spanish mountain ham).

sliced jamón

I did my best to slice the ham as thinly as possible, with a slightly blunt knife. Ideally Jamón Serrano should be sliced wafer thin and served with pan con tomate.

The sausage rolls proved to be popular and I was delighted to see chef Charlie Merrington  munch his way through four or five of them, even though he’d already been out for supper!