Sausage Rolls
Party food or Picnic food? You Decide!

Sausage rolls are something of a cliche. Put three or four people into a room with a few drinks and nibbles and someone will trot out a plateful of the puff pastry goodies.

If you're new to English food, sausage rolls are lengths of sausage meat wrapped in flaky (puff) pastry and baked in the oven until puffed up and golden.

They CAN be good if they are home-made and are served piping hot with a spicy relish or hot English mustard on the side.

But more often than not they're just tepid and greasy.

And even though they're often on the list, I don't think they make good picnic food. The pastry is just too crumbly.

So I was rather pleased when I came across a recipe for a more rustic version of this old party classic. This recipe apparently dates back to pre-Victorian times and is believed to originate in Sussex, on the south coast of England. Sausages were baked encased in bread dough to serve the local farm hands as a tasty, portable lunch.

Now we're talking!

Bread and pork sausages go exceptionally well together. And using bread dough makes the finished product much more robust and much less greasy, even when eaten cold. So now you have a choice. Try your hand at making

Both recipes are deceptively easy and require nothing more than good-quality sausages and puff pastry or bread dough to wrap. Choose your favourite sausages / sausage meat, or pick something a little more unusual if you're in a mood to experiment.

There are endless variations of this old classic, too. You could use spicy Vegetarian sausages in the filling. You could place a fried onions or a dollop of relish or mustard alongside the sausage meat before you close the wrapper. Or you could even fill the pastry or bread dough with a mixture of grated cheddar cheese and chopped spring onion.