Sunday, 24 July 2011

Sausage-rolls, rocking my freezer (and my belly)

Sausage-rolls are one of the few things I buy (rather than make) pastry for. I can make flakey enough pastry for pies, but sausage-rolls require a kind of flakiness I am not at all confident in being able to produce. So I turn to Borgs. Sausage-rolls are definitely a make-in-bulk and freeze food that I don't make often enough. That said, I tend to rely on them too much when I do have them, so maybe I make them just often enough.
I like to make them in winter because my 'secret' ingredient to make them taste amazing is chestnuts, however maybe the season is over because my supermarket didn't have any. The base of my sausage-roll mix is generally cooked soybeans, so I just threw a handful of almonds in with these to add a bit of nuttiness. Although nothing can replace the wintery, roasty goodness of chestnuts.

Sometimes I find the filling is too loose and not sausagey enough, so this time I have tried to make it a gooyer, more cohesive mixture, adding some cornmeal and gluten flour to bind the mixture and give it a more cooked, solid feeling. I typed this up while they were cooking, unsure if this would hold true or not. It did, to a degree. I would like to get a slightly chewier feel but I am reluctant change my recipe too much from the base of beans and cooked, processed carrot, onion, mushroom mixture. A solution might be to precook the filling into sausagey shapes first, although this might just make it a more time-consuming process, and I find them quite satisfying already.
I only partially cook most of them for the freezer, to the point just before the pastry browns. But these ones I cooked right through for my very delayed lunch.

I tried to get a photo that would show the filling on the inside, but it kind of all just blends in.

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