The bread lover's best sausage roll

I’m a fairly simple soul. 40 years ago, I thought Batemans Bay needed a baker because the local bakery operated by Mr & Mrs Grimston had stopped doing bread. I’m still filling that gap today. 

The thing about baking bread is you get quite attached to it. I’ll explain more later, but it takes a couple of days for me to make a great loaf of bread. When the bread doesn’t sell, I hate throwing it out, so we dry and crumb the loaves and use them to make sausage rolls. 

A past NSW premier once described sausage rolls as fat encased in fat. It’s true, but we all know that fat is the basis of amazing flavour. These next photos go some way to show that’s correct. 

This is Michael, our pastry cook, making the puff pastry. Three simple ingredients: flour, salt and water, form a firm dough. The next few steps involve folding and rolling the pastry margarine into the dough. After a while that small block of dough becomes long and thin and then cut to narrow strips, ready to morph into golden, flaky pastry.

What you can’t see is an ingredient money can’t buy and the reason I need to charge a premium. It’s simple, time! You cannot rush this process, which also explains why interrupting Michael's pastry work will sometimes make him a bit gruff.

So, the old loaves of bread become the base of our lovely sausage roll filling. We use the best ingredients we can afford. Quality meat from our local butcher Bayside Meats and flavours that you would find in your home pantry. There are no secrets, no industrial fillers or shut cuts. Then we mix them all together. 

Mixing the ingredients creates a dull coloured filling and is a bit messy. Which is why I’m not allowed to do them at home, because no one is there to clean up after me. But, it comes together, goes into a piping bag, and we squeeze the mixture onto the pastry strips prepared earlier.

I’m not recommending you take up smoking and rolling-your-own, but the next step is easier if you have some experience. Wrapping the pastry around the filling can be quite awkward.

We place the long sausage roll tubes on baking trays, spreading them out so they cook evenly. Then cut the tubes into varying lengths, depending on what we need to create, and glaze them. Depending on customer food allergies, we glaze with egg wash or a coloured water.

You can see the fancy set of wheels we use to measure even sizes along the tubes of sausage roll. And the finished product.

If you look closely, you will see one of the sausage rolls is smaller. That is what I’m really about. Quality control. That one is for me to try and make sure what you get is exactly what I like. I’ve spent the last 40 years tasting and perfecting our best sausage roll. This applies to everything we do… except for steak and kidney pies, but that’s another story.  

To see this process in action go to The bread lover's best sausage roll short video