Sausage Roll Recipe – How to Make Delicious Homemade Sausage Rolls

This sausage roll recipe for delicious homemade sausage rolls couldn’t be more easy. These sausage rolls are a breeze to make, you know what’s going in them, and while this sausage roll recipe makes delicious traditional homemade sausage rolls, you can easily tweak it each time to your taste.

For Aussies, there are few things more Australian to snack on than a sausage roll – other than a meat pie. Note that I’ve used the word ‘snack’. Sausage rolls and meat pies often get included by foreign food bloggers in lists on the best of ‘Australian cuisine‘. But unless a chef of the calibre of Peter Gilmore or Neil Perry is going to serve their rendition of an Aussie sausage roll at Quay or Rockpool Bar & Grill, as far as we’re concerned it’s a snack.

Snack food, fast food, street food, party food, whatever you want to call it, but snacking on a sausage roll is one of the most quintessential and best Australian food experiences.

In Australia, sausage rolls are warming snacks when you’re at a chilly sports stadium watching footie in winter. They’re morning tea for ‘smoko’ (a break) for a hungry tradie working on a construction site. They’re a party food staple for Aussie kids when you can serve mini-sausage rolls.

At my primary school when I was a kid, the trend was to order a sausage roll in a hot dog bun and slather it with tomato sauce. I guess it made for a more filling lunch for kids who didn’t have much lunch money.

As a teenager and a keen surfer, my morning post-surf ritual was to make a beeline for our favourite take-away joint and order a sausage roll and a meat pie – probably because it was filling as well as fast, compared to the wait after ordering a hamburger.

In Australia, both sausage rolls and meat pies are generally eaten from morning tea up until the afternoon, when the choice at the local take-away, bakery or ‘servo’ (‘gas’ station for American readers) is limited, what’s left is drying up a little, or, at the best bakeries, they’re already sold out.

When Lara and I were travelling around Australia researching travel guidebooks, one of the rituals of our road trip was to stop at the best bakery in whatever outback or country town we were passing through to buy some sausage rolls and meat pies.

We’d already have a bottle of tomato sauce in the back of the Toyota Landcruiser and a thermos of hot tea or coffee we’d made early that morning before leaving the motel. We’d wait for a scenic spot to park and pull over and eat our sausage rolls and meat pies with the kookaburras and kangaroos.

An addendum is in order: a sausage roll is no longer a snack but becomes a meal (generally lunch) if you consume it with a meat pie – or you’re under 12.

Update: Since posting this, we’ve been experimenting with Cambodian-inspired sausage rolls and meat pies. Do check out our recipes for sausage rolls with eggplant and pork based on the traditional Cambodian char-grilled eggplant and minced pork dish; Saraman curry sausage rolls and a curry beef pie made filled with the rich Cambodian Saraman curry, a relation of Thailand’s Massaman curry); a spicy pork minced pie filled with prahok k’tis, a rich pork mince, prahok, coconut cream, and pea eggplant dip; and a curried chicken pie inspired by the gently-spiced Cambodian chicken curry.

Sausage Roll Recipe – How to Make Delicious Homemade Sausage Rolls

Savoury pork mince wrapped in puff pastry came to Australia from Great Britain, where it’s a favourite with the English and Irish especially. But Australians came to love this snack so much that they made it their own.

Any bakery worth its salt has a row or two of them in their pie warmer every morning. Unlike the meat pie, hardly anyone messes with the formula for the great Australian sausage roll. You know what you’re getting when you order one.

This sausage roll recipe could be called a classic only it will give you sausage rolls that are tastier than those you’ll buy from the takeaway joint or the frozen section at the supermarket. And there’s really no excuse for that, as these sausage rolls are super easy and fast to make.

The great thing about making homemade sausage rolls is that you can eat them as soon as they’re cool enough and they taste fresh out of the oven because they are, which can’t always be said about those you’re picking up at the local bakery, takeaway joint or servo.

You also know what’s going in them, so they’re healthy. Again, the same thing definitely can’t be said of the frozen sausage rolls at the supermarket. You don’t want to know what’s gone in those.

The rest of the batch can be refrigerated and simply reheated up to temperature. Reheated later that night or the next day, they’ll brown a little more and stay nice and crispy and flaky.

When award-winning Australian cookbook author and friend Jane Lawson brought out her Milkbar Memories cookbook last year I went straight to the sausage roll recipe. We highly recommend Jane’s book, especially if, like lara and I, you grew up in the Australian suburbs in the Seventies when there was a milk bar on every corner.

I had always thought sausage rolls would be too difficult to make because of the tricky puff pastry, but Jane’s recipe uses shop-bought prepared puff pastry and it’s great to work with if you get your timing right defrosting it.

I’ve made countless batches of these sausage rolls, tweaking the recipe ever so slightly each time, always varying the amount of salt and pepper (some sausage rolls are quite peppery) and dried herbs and fresh sage – while Jane says to use either sage or rosemary, we prefer sage with the pork mince mix.

Sausage Roll Recipe for Classic Sausage Rolls

Sausage Roll Recipe

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Classic Aussie sausage roll recipe adapted from the recipe by Jane Lawson in her book, Milkbar Memories.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 45 minutes

Course: Snack

Cuisine: British/Australian

Servings: 6 Rolls

Calories: 369kcal

Author: Terence Carter adapted from the recipe by Jane Lawson in her book, Milkbar Memories

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 Small brown onion finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves crushed
• 400 grams pork mince
• 30 grams breadcrumbs
• 1 tsp fine sea salt
• 1 tsp ground white pepper
• 2 tbsp fresh sage finely chopped
• 1 tsp fennel seeds ground
• 2 sheets of puff pastry
• 1 egg
• 40 ml full-cream milk

Instructions

• Heat olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat and sauté the onion and add the garlic.
• Cool the onion mixture and add to a large bowl with the pork, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, sage and fennel seeds.
• With clean hands, mix until well combined.
• Divide the mix into 3 equal portions and refrigerate while preparing the pastry.
• Remove the puff pastry from the freezer.
• You will need one and a half pastry sheets — assuming that the pastry sheets are 25cm x 25cm. Cut the pastry sheets in half. Each half will make two sausage rolls once you fill, roll and cut in half lengthways.
• Once you have your pastry cut and ready, put the rest of your puff pastry back in the freezer.
• Place one log of the filling in the centre of the pastry and pat out to fill the length of the pastry.
• Lightly beat the egg and milk together. With a pastry brush, brush one end of each sheet of the pastry.
• Fold the pastry from both front and back and create a light seam in the middle. Lightly press the seam together.
• Cut the roll in half, making two 12.5 cm long sausage rolls.
• Place the rolls seam-side down on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Brush the top of the rolls with the egg wash.
• Refrigerate while you make the remaining rolls.
• Preheat the oven to 200˚C and bake the rolls until they are golden brown and cooked through (internal temperature should be 71˚C). This should take around 20 to 30 minutes depending on the oven. I like to rotate the tray half way through to help get an even golden brown crust.
• Serve with tomato sauce.

Nutrition

Serving: 1g | Calories: 369kcal | Carbohydrates: 27g | Protein: 10g | Fat: 24g | Saturated Fat: 10g | Cholesterol: 72mg | Sodium: 936mg | Fiber: 3g | Sugar: 1g

Do you have a favourite sausage roll recipe? If you make this sausage roll recipe we’d love to hear how it turned out and if there was anything you tweaked to your taste.