Sausage roll facts for kids
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| Type | Pastry |
|---|---|
| Course | Lunch / Snack |
| Main ingredients | Puff pastry, sausage meat |
A sausage roll is a tasty pastry snack. It's very popular in countries that are part of the Commonwealth, like the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. You can buy them in shops and bakeries as a quick meal or a snack to take with you. Smaller versions, called mini sausage rolls, are often served at parties and buffets. Other countries have similar foods, like the Dutch saucijzenbroodje or sausage bread in the United States.
What's Inside a Sausage Roll?
A sausage roll is usually made with puff pastry. This light, flaky pastry is wrapped around a filling of sausage meat. Before baking, the pastry is often brushed with egg or milk to give it a golden shine.
Sausage rolls can be eaten warm or cold. Long ago, in the 1800s, they were sometimes made with a different kind of pastry called shortcrust pastry.
If you don't eat meat, there are also vegetarian or vegan sausage rolls. These use a meat substitute instead of real sausage meat. They taste just as delicious!
Sausage Roll Sales
Sausage rolls are super popular! In the United Kingdom, one famous bakery chain called Greggs sells a huge number of them. They sell about 2.5 million sausage rolls every single week. That's around 140 million sausage rolls in a year!
The History of Sausage Rolls
People have been wrapping meat in dough for a very long time. This idea goes back to ancient Greek and Roman times. But the sausage roll as we know it today, with meat wrapped in rolled pastry, started in France in the early 1800s.
The flaky pastry used in sausage rolls came from the Hungarian croissant in the late 1600s. Early versions of sausage rolls, often filled with pork, became very popular in London during the Napoleonic Wars. Soon, they became known as a classic English dish.
Newspapers mentioned sausage rolls as early as 1809. In 1864, The Times newspaper wrote about a sausage roll maker. This shows how common they were even back then.
