Chef That! Sausage Rolls!

And of course as a chef, we take these little offcuts and we stick them on the tray, and that's our little snack. Hey guys, I'm Curtis Stone, I'm the chef at Gwen Restaurant here in Los Angeles. I'm also starting something brand new called The Pie Room by Curtis Stone, which I'm very excited about. We make all sorts of delicious meat pies, both inspired from Britain, where I guess pies sort of began. And of course Australia, we've made little adaptations to them along the way. And one thing that we're very proud of, it should almost be stamped into our passports, are sausage rolls. You could ask yourself what is it, and you could try and find something that's a bit similar to, but the truth is they're very unique and they're extremely delicious. They're either made with puff pastry or a rough puff pastry, and then they're filled usually with pork, that's how we have them normally in Australia. I do a version with chicken and I also do a version with pork, and they're as delicious as each other. So I'm going to make you the chicken one today, and my tummy's rumbling and I know yours will be when you get to see them. Now there's not a tonne of ingredients, it's really ground chicken, or pork of course, and then you spice it and season it with flavours that you like. Some fresh herbs, I've got some butter and some mustard. We're going to add a little bit of breadcrumb, and I've also got my spices here, so that's what we start with. Panko breadcrumbs are in my bowl, I'm going to add a little bit of salt. I have some oregano, or oregano. I have some porcini powder, or dried porcinis that I've thrown into a food processor, and that gives a really delicious umami. You can buy dried porcinis too, and you can just throw them into a little food processor. So growing up, sausage rolls were one of those things that everyone's mum kind of makes, and of course some mums, or dads, make them better than others. My mum made a really good sausage roll, so I always loved it, it was like that snack you get when you get home from school, or maybe on the weekends you'd have sausage rolls for lunch. It's a bit like what an American hot dog could be, right? We eat it in the same sort of a way, but it's also something pretty special that people do have their own recipes from, and most families and homes have their own sort of take on it. So just finely chop those herbs, that's my scallions right there, next I'll do the parsley. A good sausage roll is lovely and light, so the flaky puff pastry is really nice and light, and then of course the sausage, or the centre, you don't want it to be too dense. And sometimes, some people will just literally take ground meat, and then they might put a little bit of onion or garlic through it, and then that'll be it. But that of course cooks down almost like a burger patty would, so it becomes kind of dense, so I like using a little bit of fat, using a little bit of breadcrumb, and then using all of that flavour to sort of lighten up the mixture. The next stage is you take a pastry bag, just like this, but you go ahead and fill this up, pull it up like that, you just give it a twist, tie your bag off. So we've actually got the pastry right here, now you can use a store-bought puff pastry, that'll work really nicely. I sort of make this almost a little bit like a rough puff, I use creme fraiche and I use some fresh herbs, but the truth is, a store-bought puff pastry works really nicely. All you do is lay it out just like that, I've got it on a silicon mat, you could use a little piece of parchment paper if you wanted to. And then you just snip the end of the bag off, just like that. Don't snip it off too fine, you're going to want a decent size to be piped out of this. And then all you do is you just pipe that meat straight along, just like that. Now of course, if you wanted to, you could just spoon the meat along, that's what my mum used to do, she didn't have fancy piping bags, so you don't need them either. And then, like the name would suggest, we roll the sausage, right, it's a sausage roll. So all you're going to do is take a little bit of creme, and don't overuse it, you just need just a tiny bit of that creme, that's going to help it stick. You can just pick up that pastry, bring it on over, just like that. And then you kind of just find the edge with your thumb, push that down, just like so. And then using a clean knife, you just go ahead and cut that through. Then you can pick up that whole log, sausage roll, like that. Then you need a fork, and you're going to just crimp it down with a fork, just like so. If you need to dip that in a little flour in between, you can, just so it doesn't stick. So this is sealing it, but it also gives it a really nice kind of appearance when it's finished. You can cut these as big as you want, like my mum used to cut them that big, and that was lunch. Now, I cut them a little smaller, and I think they're sort of a nice little snack, but just go ahead and punch through it just like that with your knife, and then you can pick that up and place it straight on your parchment paper. It's important to wipe your knife after each cut because you don't want little pieces of sausage on the top of your sausage roll, but again, that's just me being a little bit pedantic. You can go ahead and cut them however you like. That was the chicken mix. Now, of course, you can make it out of beef, pork, chicken, whatever you like. I've actually done one with pork. The only real difference here is I use cream instead of butter, and that gives it a really nice texture, and again, same sort of process. I'm just going to snip the top off. All right, the last thing that you need to do is just take a little bit of cream. You could use egg as well. You could use egg wash. You could use just egg yolk. Egg yolk's going to give you a really deep colour. I like cream because it doesn't give you too much colour on the outside, and it still keeps a beautiful little glaze on it. It also allows anything that you want to stick to it to stick, so if you want to add sesame seeds, and I'm going to add some white and black sesame seeds, but you could add black pepper, you could add a type of spice that you use in the sausage roll, so get creative with it. And while these bake, I'm actually going to teach you how to make what we serve with them, which is also really important. We call it tomato sauce. It's another name for ketchup. Probably a little less sugar than what you'd find traditionally in ketchup, but it's really delicious, and you dunk these in, and it's the perfect combination. They go into the oven until they're golden brown and cooked through. They'll probably take 25 minutes, maybe up to 30, and you can cook them somewhere between 350 and 375. Depends a little on your oven. I'm going to pop these in at 375. I'm going to show you how to make what we eat with sausage rolls, and I say we like every single Australian I'm representing, and I kind of am, because that's the way we eat sausage rolls. We always dunk them in tomato sauce. Now, of course, there's a thousand things you can serve with a sausage roll. It could be a relish, a pickle, a piccalilli. There's so many. Even mustard is really nice with it, but the truth is, in Australia, if you don't put it in tomato sauce, they take your passport from you. I'm not sure why. Start by dicing a couple of onions. They don't have to be perfect, because ultimately, we're going to pop it into the blender anyway, so I'm just going to go ahead and slice straight through that. And then I'm going to give that a dice. When you get down to that little end, you can cut through it that way, stand it back up, cut through it that way, and spin it around, so then you literally are wasting absolutely nothing. And you just kind of squash that down against the bottom of the pan, and that's going to just start to caramelise and roast and give you a really lovely sweet flavour. They're looking good. Now, one thing I didn't mention before is once you cut them and pop them on the tray, a really good idea is to put it back in the fridge for maybe an hour. That allows the puff pastry, especially if you're using a straight puff, it'll just rest, which sounds like, why do you need to let your pastry rest? But there's gluten in pastry, and when you roll it, manipulate it in any way, that gluten becomes more active, and that's why it sometimes can rise in some pretty crazy sort of shapes, right? The gluten becomes really active. By popping it back in the fridge and giving it that time to rest, you'll get a much better, nicer rise out of it. OK, once you see this is getting really quite beautiful and darky, you see that gorgeous caramelisation that we're picking up, that's the colour that you're looking for. So then you can start adding your spices in, and toast those spices in your pan. As soon as they go in, you'll smell them. Ooh, delicious. Then we add our liquid, so we can add in our soy sauce, a little bit of apple cider vinegar, and then these are canned or tinned tomatoes, there's the San Marzano's, they're crushed, they've been skinned, and then we just let it simmer away until we get that right consistency, then we'll call it, we'll blend it in the food processor, and that's it. Oh, yeah. Perfection. Oh, yeah. You can serve these warm or you can serve them hot. I don't think you should serve them cold. Some people will, but I think you should serve them warm or hot. Here's how that beautiful ketchup comes out. Once it's chilled, the colour just brightens up ever so slightly, and there's nothing left to do but invite your friends around. That one's still a little warm, so I'm gonna go for this guy. Just dip it in just like that, and you're officially an Aussie. Oh, yeah.