tuftears | Cooking Experiment: Sausage Rolls

I'll explain a bit more about why I decided to make sausage rolls next post, but for this one, let's just roll with "it seemed like a good idea at the time". :)

After doing some research, I thought Delia's Sausage Rolls recipe would be the most 'impressive' (in terms of actual cooking ability needed) sausage rolls recipe to make for a planned brunch, so I started out by buying some Italian sausage filling, the sort that comes in one of those 'just cut me open' bags in the supermarket, and some fancy European butter.

It seemed to be coming along pretty promisingly... I made the dough by grating the butter into a bowl of sifted wheat flour, stirred, and all that stuff, then put that into the fridge to chill while I made the sausage filling with the aforementioned meat, frozen chopped onions, and some seasoning. Then I rolled the dough out into rectangles and used those to wrap long fingers of sausage filling up like little pockets.

Since I was planning to use these for a brunch, and I was going to take them from the freezer and bake them just in time for the brunch, I froze them first rather than baking straightaway, so that I could bake a couple and see how they came out, allowing me to adjust baking times as needed.

The burnt part? That's where I used too much egg wash. After observing that, I made sure in next set of sausage rolls to just use my fingertips and dab the stuff on.

It's a good thing for me since circumstances would intervene so that these would be the only ones of the sausage rolls I'd get to eat...

The actual brunch got postponed, so I left the rest of the tray in the freezer! ... Then I accidentally left the freezer door ajar and the freezer defrosted.

Needless to say, I wasn't taking any chances with thawed-out sausage rolls that might have started breeding bacteriae, and I was worried about the freezer itself no longer working (it wasn't clear to me at the time what had happened) so I wound up throwing the rest of the sausage rolls out, alas. I went with a quick pre-made crescent roll dough from Trader Joe's, and their already-cooked Nuremberg-style bratwurst breakfast sausages as well. Those came out fine.

As far as these go, they're a lot of work and pretty greasy because of the sausage filling and the high percentage of butter to flour in the wrapping, IMO. If you don't mind that, go for it, but in the future, I'll use seasoned ground turkey for the filling instead, and a more biscuit-like wrapper.