Simple sausage rolls, made easy by buying both premade puff pastry dough and sausage. This is less a recipe than quick-notes-to-self, after doing a few experiments:

  • Defrost the frozen puff pastry (from Dufour) in the fridge overnight.
  • Preheat the oven to 425F.
  • Caramelize three onions: cook 10 minutes covered at medium-high heat to soften, then cook uncovered another 45 minutes or so on medium-low, stirring occasionally. I deglazed the pan with a Tbsp of water twice when they stuck.
  • Carefully unfold the puff pastry and lightly roll it out (not trying to roll it thinner– just to smooth out some ripples/seams from where it had been folded).
  • Lay out some ground sweet italian sausage (already seasoned and salted) in a line, top with the caramelized onions.
  • Roll it up and brush with egg yolk wash (next time: roll a bit more snug / cylindrical)
  • Slice it into a few pieces (see below: next time leave them twice as long so there’s less exposed end for sausage to bubble out of)
  • Bake 8-10min at 425, until the pastry has puffed up significantly and started to brown:

  • Turn heat down to 375 and bake another ~14min until darker brown, so about 22-24min total.

A few side experiments:

  • I baked one with the ‘meat axis’ vertical instead of horizontal and that turned out well, uniform puff pastry all around (but one end of the roll flat where it was sitting on the pan). I might even prefer this.
  • I pulled one sausage roll earlier at 20min total: it was still moist and delicious, and the bottom pastry was firm and not soggy, but the bottom pastry wasn’t as puffed up.
  • I left one sausage roll in much longer, about 30min total, and the exposed onion burned a bit.
  • I also piled some chopped mango and meyer lemon marmalade on a square of leftover puff pastry, without docking or scoring, and it was delicious. The weight in the center alone lead to a nice difference in height with a puffed border.

Quantity notes: Scaling up what I’d done, I expect one 15oz package of frozen puff pastry + 3/4 lbs ground sausage + 5 caramelized onions would be a good combination and would make ~12 small sausage rolls like the above, or 6 larger ones.