Homemade Sausage Rolls

Traditional Oven versus Halogen Cooker / Oven

If you've never made your own sausage rolls - I'd urge you to have a go. It's so easy your 5 year old could do it on his / her own. They also taste a MILLION times better than shop bought.

Basically, all you need is a pack of shop bought puff pastry, some sausagemeat, an onion (optional) and an egg or some milk to glaze.

Roll out the pastry and cut into rectangles. Put some sausagemeat in the middle of each one and egg wash round the outside. Press edges with a fork (leaving ends open) to seal and put a couple of slashes in the top. You can make them as big as you like. Generally, you'll get 8 giant ones, 12 standard, 16 medium or 40 mini sausage rolls from 6 butchers sausages and a pack of puff pastry

You don't have to buy basic sausagemeat - you can buy some seriously good sausages these days and just remove the skins. I buy ours from the butchers and last weeks special (shown here) was pork, gammon and pineapple.

I cooked the first batch in the conventional fan oven for 20mins at 210 deg C on a silicone baking sheet on top of a tray.

I cooked the second batch in my Sarah-Jane's Halogen Oven on a baking tray at the same temperature (ALWAYS preheat oven for bread / pastry for 5 mins full power). These were nicely done in just 10mins. Super watching them - they rise so fast in front of your eyes :-)

I couldn't tell the difference in pastry or taste between batches - but they DID stick to the non stick baking tray in the halogen oven..... and they glided off the silicone baking sheet from the conventional oven.

The non-stick baking tray with the halogen oven is very good - but if something is going to stick, it will. I'm going to cut a silicone sheet to fit the circular halogen oven tray