Pork & Apple Sausage Rolls

I’m back from my trip to America and strangely I loved the food! However we rarely strayed from places highly recommended - both through people we were staying with / the internet. The downside of American food I did return from my holiday with mild twitching and nausea from a reduced sugar intake. This is an embellishment but their food is high in sugar, for example their idea of a country loaf is brioche and some of their pizzas are Bostock with peperoni! So, in no way inspired from my foodie adventure in the states, I have made something terribly British in the form of sausage rolls. Some say the eating of sausage rolls on a bank holiday was the 11^th commandment -all I know is that it should be.

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  What you need:

  
  

  • 500 g of pork mice
  • 1 onion
  • 1 British apple - I used a Bramley 
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • Fresh sage leaves
  • 1 egg
  • 100 g of unsalted butter 
  • 50 g of brown sugar
  • 2-3 handfuls of bread crumbs
  • A batch of my hangry cook puff pastry (http://hangrycook.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/puff-pastry.html)

  
  

  
  

  How to make it:

  
  

  1. Dice up the onion and garlic finely and soften over a low heat in a pan with some extra butter and a pinch of seasoning.
  2. While the onion is cooking make the apple sauce, which will be used both as a dip and a filling in the roll. Remove the core of the apple and cut into chunks. Add to a saucepan the chunks of apple, 50g brown sugar, 5 tbsp of water and 50 g of butter. Stir the mix often to stop burning!
  3. Once the onions have taken on a brown colour - after about 20 minutes of cooking- add in 6 large leaves of sage that you have very finely diced up. Continue cooking for a further minute or two stirring the sage into the onion. Take the pan off the heat and allow to cool.
  4. At this point the apple should be pretty much mush and ready so take it off the heat and cool. Also melt the last 50 g of butter and get that cooling as well.
  5. Once everything is cold put the meat in a large bowl, add in the melted butter, onion mix and half of the apple sauce, not forgetting to season the meat concoction you have made. To test if the meat is where you want it, in terms of seasoning at taste, mix it together with the flavourings and take a small amount. Fry that in a pan as a little burger and eat it. What do you think? Does it need more seasoning, apple sauce or sage? Then add to your liking.
  6. All that’s left is to roll out the pastry into a rectangle about £1 coin in thickness. Cut this into 2 smaller but identical rectangles and spoon the meat in sausage shapes onto one of the pastry sheets. Leave at least 2cm between each sausage and egg wash in between each one. Now lay on top of this the 2^nd pastry sheet – you made need to roll this slightly bigger to compensate for the filling. Press the pastry down between each roll to seal and cut each individual sausage roll.  I made 6 thick rolls in two batches. I put them in the fridge while I made the other rolls. Egg wash the rolls to ensure a final golden coating once cooked and score the top of the pastry in whatever pattern takes your fancy. Bake in a 180 degrees C oven until the pastry is crisp and golden – this took about 20 minutes for me. At this point take a roll out, chop it in half and inspect the meat to make sure it is cooked through.
  7. Cool and eat in a socially weird thing like a picnic.