I guess the Brits have a bit of an obsession with sausage rolls. The very term "sausage roll" doesn't sound all that American to me, so right there, in the words themselves, we have a slight hint of the foreign.* If I'm not mistaken, I've already linked to a Sorted Food video about sausage rolls and have tried making them myself. (The result was a failure, but I did learn a lot.) The following video caught my eye, not only because it was about sausage rolls, but because the guy claims to be able to make a "rough puff" pastry dough in about ten minutes. My mind blurted, "Bullshit—that's impossible," but the video now had my full attention, so I watched it all the way through. I had to watch the video: so-called "shortcut" versions of the standard puff-pastry recipe still take hours to make: the shortcuts are never that short. This was my first time ever hearing the claim that any sort of puff pastry could be made in less than a quarter of an hour. Ultimately, the method wasn't so different from making pie dough, but it involved a bit of stretching and folding to create layers.
Maybe I just don't get out enough. Have you heard this claim?
Anyway, the video was also informative when it came to making the sausage. Fatty meat is definitely the order of the day, and the guy—Gill Meller—used a technique that I had stumbled upon when making gyros last year: use panko or other bread crumbs in the mix to retain the fat and keep it from spilling everywhere.
As you saw in the video, Meller makes his sausage with sage—a nod to American-style sausage. However, he also salutes Italy by sprinkling fennel seeds across the tops of his rolls: fennel seeds are a crucial component in Italian sausage. I'm impatient to try making this recipe sometime soon. As for the "rough puff"... I'll believe it's awesome when I see it up close.
*Asian bakeries sell their own perverted forms of sausage rolls, usually involving some sort of bland, spiraled bread and a hot dog, which only barely qualifies as a bona fide sausage.
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