Sausage Rolls, England's Favorite Pastries, Are Better Than Ever
Parceling meat into pastry is a serious, time-honored craft in England. There are pasties, pies and Wellingtons, their myriad fillings tucked inside duvets of crisp puff pastry. But perhaps no creation is as beloved as the sausage roll. Unlike a pie, which is wet with gravy and requires a fork, a sausage roll can be neatly slipped into a pocket and eaten ad hoc. Made from a mix of minced pork, breadcrumbs, herbs and spices encased in deeply tanned pastry, it's a suitable commuter breakfast, teatime snack or even pub dinner, when paired with a ramekin of hot mustard and a Guinness.
Apart from during and directly after World War II, when the British Ministry of Food reduced the required meat content of sausage from 80 percent to just 30 percent, the recipe for sausage rolls hasn't varied much in the past century. The pastry, most often puff, is laminated, which requires a laborious folding and rolling process to combine the dough and butter. Herbs and spices, typically including fennel seeds, fleck the minced pork to temper its fattiness. But today's English chefs have found ways to refresh the national favorite: At Farro in Bristol, the baker Bradley Tapp uses pork and wheat from the same nearby farm, milling his flour in-house. Others are experimenting with laminating their pastry with lard, for a nose-to-tail approach. At Layla Bakery in London's Notting Hill, the pastry chef Colton Dinner fashions sausage rolls from scraps of croissant dough and, in January, he introduced a vegetarian haggis version for the Scottish celebration Burns Night.
Recent years have seen a broader uptick in vegetarian fillings. Hart's Bakery in Bristol serves a plant-based sausage roll stuffed with pearl barley and mushroom, while Fortitude Bakehouse in London folds dough around spinach and feta. High street sausage roll purveyors are also following the trend. The vegan sausage roll at the fast-food bakery Greggs, which owes its deeply savory flavor to a mushroom-based paste, is so beloved that it contributed to a 58 percent increase in profits in 2019, the year it was introduced. At the bakery chain Gail's, more pastries are now filled with spinach and feta than with pork each day.
While the pastries can be found from coast to coast, sausage rolls in the capital are both plentiful and varied — and their devotees are die-hard. Here, creative Londoners share their favorite spots.
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