The Roughest Rough Puff

From 2007:

I always intend to prepare for Christmas in plenty of time, but it never seems to happen! One thing I do like to make is my own sausage rolls. There is no comparison between a homemade sausage roll, made with good (home-made) sausage meat and the awful frozen sludge-filled offerings at the supermarket. Uncooked commercially produced sausage rolls only need to have a 6% meat content!

For sausage rolls I make a quick rough puff pastry:

Ingredients
250gm Plain Flour
Pinch of Salt
125gm Butter
125gm Lard or Vegetarian Fat
135gm Cold Water
A small squeeze of Lemon Juice

Method

  1. Put the flour and salt in a food processor.
  2. Cut butter into 4 pieces, put 3 on a plate and 1 in the flour.
    Do the same with the Lard.
  3. Soften the butter on the plate in a microwave using the defrost setting. Do the same with the Lard.
  4. Add the water and lemon to the food processor and mix to a dough.
  5. Roll the dough out on a floured board into a rectangle about 3 times as long as it is wide (see photo)

Spread the top two-thirds of the rectangle with one portion of both the butter and lard – just like buttering bread.

Fold the un-buttered bottom third up.

And then the top third down.

Turn the pastry ¼ turn.

Roll the dough back out to the size it was originally and repeat the above twice with the other two portions of lard and butter. Then, repeat it one more time without adding any fat. You’ll end up with something like this:

I’m freezing this for later use as I need to make some more sausage meat. Had I have been organised, I would have had the fresh sausage meat ready so I could have frozen the completed sausage rolls ready for cooking.

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