Sausage Roll Tea
Yet more Completely Perfect for a Saturday tea, but this time I went off piste when following the perfect sausage rolls. I love a sausage roll, they’re much better than the sad limp party food they are thought of as. For these I asked the gang at Block’n’Bottle to mince me a piece of pork belly and a couple of slices of smoked bacon, skipping the pork shoulder that The Cloake suggests. The end result was a touch greasy, so next time maybe I’ll listen. I also upped the ratio of herbs and peel to meat.
You will need
The pasty
- 120g plain flour
- 75g fat (I used tesco’s “baking block”)
- A heavy pinch of mustard powder
- A couple teaspons of really cold water
- An egg
- A teaspoon of nigella seeds
The meat filling
- About 200g of minced pork (I use dpork belly wihtout the skin and a couple slices of smoked bacon)
- The peel of a lemon
- A handful of thyme leaves
- About half as much fresh sage
- A good pinch of ground black pepper
- A good pinch of rough sea salt
Do
- Rub the flour, musard and butter together until it forms breadcrumbs
- Add cold water a tiny bit at a time to form a smooth dough. It really takes very little
- Wrap the pastry in clingfilm and stick it in the fridge for an hour
- Zest the lemon into a bowl, catching all the spray oil
- Mix in the meat, herbs, salt and black pepper
- Keep mixing it untl it’s pretty homogernous. You don’t want to have lumps of pork fat
- Stick the oven on 220oC
- Roll out the pastry into a rectangle that’s about twice as long as it is wide. I did it on a piece of clingfilm which makes it easier to roll over
- Shape the meat up the middle
- Beat the egg and brush it up one side of the pasty so you can get a good seal when you roll it over
- Using the clingfilm, roll the pasty over to enclose the meat
- Egg wash it and sprinkle with nigella seeds
- Slice into fat round alittle more than an inch thhick
- Bake in the oven near the top for about 20 minutes until the pastry has just caught and the meat is cooked all the way though
Result
I served them with tiny roast potatoes (airfrier magic), a roast onion (done in the airfrier at the same time as the potatoes) and fresh cabbage. The pasty is just solid enough to support the sausage meat which is super lemony and punchy. The nigella seeds add a bit of a bit of a naan like smell. I might be tempted to brush them with melted butter to double down on this.
