Sausage Rolls the Delia Way!

It's easy to see why Delia Smith superseded Fanny Cradock.

Sausage Rolls with Quick Flaky Pastry There's really no point in writing directions when Delia Smith can show us how faster than anyone could read it. Just watch her video and you'll see how easy this is. If you prefer to use nonmetric units instead of the quantities in the video, here are the amounts: 4 oz butter (ie, 1 stick or ½ cup) 6 oz flour (1½ cups) Pinch of salt A little cold water        Filling: 1 pound pork sausage meat 1 medium onion, finely minced (use a mini food processor if you have one) 2 rounded tablespoons chopped sage leaves (about ⅓ oz, chopped together with the onion) -- use dried sage if the fresh sage is either too expensive or looks ratty in the store Salt and pepper to taste 1 egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon milk, for the glaze Note: If you're economizing on eggs, you can use milk instead (both for sealing the rolls shut and for brushing on top). You won't get that super-shiny layer on top, but they'll still be really good. Source: Delia Smith Online

Sometimes I watch Delia Smith videos just to decompress my mind. Even if you're not looking for clear and precise recipe guides, Delia's videos are very relaxing to watch while your mind wanders to other places. You can't look away from Fanny Cradock, but Delia is so much easier to watch. I've been rewatching this particular video in a lot, and those sausage rolls look better every time.

Now, as an ignorant American, our version of "sausage rolls" involves wrapping pre-fabricated cocktail weenies in bread dough and then baking them. The British wrap raw sausage meat in pastry and then bake until the meat is cooked. And having made British-style sausage rolls once, our American version will never be the same.

With our crisis of refrigeration safely over, I've been semi-regularly going through the chest freezer to see what I forgot was in there. When we hastily flung everything into there, I didn't have time to bother examining what I was trying to save. So, a lot of fairly old frozen things got buried among half-empty sauce jars and chopped vegetables. This is why I recently found a batch of uncooked turkey burgers that are perhaps embarrassingly old. (The last time I made them, I doubled the recipe and froze half for some future night when I didn't want to cook.)  

I was going to simply bake them as they were, but then I decided they could become really good sausage rolls. It's tempting to say they'd be reduced-fat since they're turkey meat, but don't forget how much raw bacon got ground into them.

Since I made the sausage filling a year ago, I only needed to make the pastry. I found an earlier video of Delia doing the same recipe in the pre-metric days. The method is the same, but there were no mentions of grams or milliliters. The older recipe uses exactly one stick of butter. I'm not going anti-metric, but I went with the one that wouldn't leave me with odd-size butter partials in the refrigerator. 

Not long after putting the bowl on the countertop, we had a big pile of frozen butter curls just like in the video. I have to say, if you follow Delia Smith's directions, things almost always come out just like the video. This is why she has been popular for some fifty years.

Delia tells us to use a palette knife to mix everything, but I don't have one. A plain knife from the cutlery drawer did the trick.

Here is our butter, all coated with flour and ready to become something great!

We are directed to mix the dough by repeatedly cutting into it with a knife. This reminded me of our "perfect pie" article which says that we "can not hurt this dough if you will just mix it as a man does with mixing mortar with a hoe." (I'm still quite not sure what that means.) Seeing the same advice in different places shouldn't surprise me. After all, basic methods are the same no matter who is presenting them.

We had a lumpy dough after a minute or two. I checked the video, and Delia's looked a bit lumpy too. And since Delia never does any fake recipes or trick editing, this means that our dough was exactly right. 

Our pastry had some hairline cracks when I got it out of the (blessedly working!) refrigerator. They don't look bad, but I could tell they would expand into major fissures as I rolled the dough out.

Fortunately, the other side was nice and smooth. I flipped the dough over and hoped the cracks underneath would smush together instead of spreading.

Things looked really great from the beginning. Again, if you follow a Delia Smith recipe, you cannot go wrong unless you go off-book. Just look at how perfectly straight the sides are after giving them a good sideways thwack with the rolling pin!

Delia says to roll out the dough to 20 x 30 centimeters, but I didn't want to bring a ruler into the kitchen. For one thing, I'd have to find where at least one of them went. Second, I didn't want to accidentally strip off the markings when I gave it an alcohol rubdown after being so close to raw meat. So, we made our dough one rolling pin wide and one-and-a-half rolling pins long. 

Measurements aside, look at how perfect the dough came out! No cracks, no rips, just a beautiful rectangle of paste. (On a side note, I finally see why we all switched from saying "paste" to "pastry." Who wants to say things like "Working with paste is a skill" or "my paste cracked while rolling it"?)  

I didn't get my meat into a long, neat log like Delia did in the video. Instead, I ended up just laying short segments of meat on top of the dough and hoping they'd stick together after cooking. Also, I figured that wouldn't matter after the meat was encased in a tube of dough.

Delia's sausage rolls were so much easier to close than the ones we made for our British picnic. The person in the 1930s video had to pinch the dough together. But Delia simply rolls the crust around the sausage and then presses the whole thing closed.

These sausage rolls were a LOT bigger than I expected. Our previous British-style sausage rolls were sized like finger food, but two or three of these are a complete dinner if you remember to come up with a vegetable.

For reference, this is the big pan. It can hold 20 cookies.

Naturally, we lined the pan. I was going to anyway, but Delia warned us that "The liner is going to save you an awful lot of scrubbing and cleaning later on." She doesn't usually mention washing dishes in her videos, so I figured this pan would become a truly dire project without protection.

Next, we are told to use scissors to snip three vent-holes on each one. When we held the scissors at a slant instead of vertically, we got the same cute little V's that Delia did. I got to use my new favorite kitchen shears for this.

I really like these scissors ever since my friend sharpened them for me. In the short time since I got them out of the closet and back into use, they have been involved in a lot of things involving raw meat. The blades are slowly becoming shinier from getting repeatedly wiped with rubbing alcohol.

Just before getting these into the oven, I had to diverge from Delia's directions. She has us brushing the rolls with an egg wash, and I'm trying to cut back on our egg use for the next couple of weeks. A couple of nights ago, I really wanted an omelet and my attempts kept sticking to the pan. I would ordinarily decide that scrambled eggs are a perfectly good second choice, but this time I wanted an omelet and nothing else would do. I am not thrilled about how many greasy scrambled messes went into the trash can, but I figured I should probably cut back on gratuitous egg use until it averages out. So I brushed these with milk instead. (I also brushed milk on the insides of these to seal them together. It worked just fine.) I know that an egg wash would have given us a shiny, crackly top. But sometimes we have to economize and make up for yesterday's extravagance.

To make up for not brushing on an extra-crisp top layer, I sprinkled the rolls with cheese. I know that deviating from a Delia recipe means that you no longer have a 100% guarantee of success, but I figured this was a safe change.

After about a minute of baking, I heard a horrible CLANG! and feared that my future held some very expensive appliance repairs. But no, it was just our baking sheet, which had decided to suddenly warp. I might have tried to carefully slide the fully-loaded baking paper onto a different pan, but our homemade flaky pastry had already become half-melted. So, I had to simply hope that the lowest row of sausage rolls wouldn't mind all of grease sliding down to them.

After baking these rolls, I saw why we were warned to line the pan to avoid "an awful lot of scrubbing and cleaning later on." Since I heeded Delia's instructions, I only had to roll up the paper and throw the would-have-been labor into the trash.

I had worried about encasing raw sausage meat in dough with nowhere for the grease to drain to, but I felt a lot better after lifting the liner away. Instead of staying inside the rolls, the sausage grease had seeped out and then hid under the paper.

I didn't mind handwashing the grease from the pan since the really charred-on mess was already in the trash. And anyway, cleaning the pan was a perfect way to avoid waste while I was running the hot water to the sink before starting the dishwasher.

But enough about cleanup- let's get back to the sausage rolls. I cut one in half and the crust crackled on contact with the knife. When Delia Smith promises something, she delivers. She said this was flaky pastry, and it flaked deliciously. I am so glad I didn't mistakenly cut the recipe in half.