Sausage Rolls

I'm always looking for new recipes to try as part of my daily entertainment, and after discovering this awesome cooking show, The Fabulous Baker Brothers, I knew what my next project would be!  I decided to make some Sausage Rolls last week, inspired by the Baker Brother's Spicy Chorizo Sausage Rolls and their Rabbit Pie.

I wouldn't be able to recreate it exactly because I don't have half of these ingredients (even though the show is based in the UK) but I just sort of winged it and the result was pretty damn good.

The cast of characters: red onions, a lemon, mushrooms, butter ("a good knob of butter", the recipe said), eggs, bacon, sherry/madeira, roasted red pepps, puff pastry sheets, spicy red peppers, and flavored sausage (the recipe calls for chorizo, but I got cracked black pepper sausage and garlic/basil sausage). 

Take a large red onion or two small red onions and chop 'em up.

Throw them in a pan with some olive oil (and a little butter if you're feeling crazy) and sauté 'em up.  And chop up as many mushrooms as you want (I like a ton) and throw those in there too.  Stir them around and get them nice and brown.

Chop up your spicy red peppers and some cloves of garlic.

Throw those in the pan with the shrooms and onions and let those cook too.

Pour in some madeira wine/sherry and let the pan sizzle!  Scrape up all the brown bits and get that delish flavor into those veggies.

As I don't have a dishwasher and like to conserve the amount of times I have to wash things, I poured all the cooked-down veggie deliciousness into a bowl to use the pan again.

Then I heated up the pan again and squeezed the sausages out of their casing into the pan....

And browned it up until it's cooked through.

Slice up your roasted red peppers and add those to the bowl.

Brown the sausage....

And get those guys to the party too.

Stir it all up.  Add some seasonings too!  Salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, whatever you like.  Why not.

Then brown the bacon, or the "rasher"/ham the Irish call bacon, in the pan.

While that's cooking, zest a lemon and squeeze some juice in there with it.  I thought this was an odd addition but if the Baker boys say it, I'll do it.

Chop up your bacon/rasher.

And add that in.

Then it tells you to separate an egg and add the yolk to the mixture.  This means it's your last time to taste your heavenly sausage/bacon/veggie combo.  Drew said he could eat that alone as cereal.  Ha.

Now the mixture is complete.  I've never worked with puff pastry before, and honestly it kinda scared and intimidated me - but there was really no reason for it!  Except...you DO need to know how to use it.  For example, I thought it had to be frozen.  It's generally kept in the freezer section so I figured...you just take it out of the freezer and it's ready!  Wrong.  I guess it's supposed to be refrigerated but not frozen.  So much to my surprise, it was solid and wouldn't unroll...which meant I had to sit in front of the preheated oven and hold the puff pastry in the oven trying to thaw it.  Whoops.

After you defrost it, roll it out...

And put about half of your sausage mixture in the middle.

Kinda shape it like a long roll or tube, I guess.

Now it calls for egg wash on one edge, to seal it up when you bring the other side over.  I don't have a brush for these types of things so I used my fingers.

Fold the far side over the mixture and seal it.

Crimping it with a fork after you've sealed it helps it stay and just makes it look pretty.

Now cut it into three sections.  (Not sure why this picture appears sideways.)

And position those pups on your baking sheet.

Then repeat with the other puff pastry sheet and the sausage mixture.  After you have six good-looking rolls, it calls for you to egg wash all of the rolls.  Again, used my hands.

And then sprinkle smokey paprika over the top!  Mmmmm.  I love paprika.

Pop those guys in the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius.  Or around 400 degrees Fahrenheit if you must.

Lookin good!  Maybe a little overcooked but still a masterpiece in my eyes.

I had some frozen broccoli so I browned some onions and shrooms in a pan and threw the broccoli in to cook with them.  Salt, pepper, garlic and lemon juice - voila!  You have an easy side dish!

Yum city.

These weren't as beautiful as the Baker Brother's rolls, and I didn't follow the recipe exactly, but they turned out pretty well for my first attempt at puff pastry cooking.  As per usual, I didn't measure everything so I feel like I can't really post a specific recipe on here - but you can look at the two I used and combined a bit here and here.  I'll be experimenting more this fall so stay tuned!  Bon appetite!