A delicious lunch or party dish, and very economical yet impressive. Use shop bought puff pastry – homemade puff pastry is difficult and labor intensive and most restaurants use ready made! Can be served with a potato salad or mixed salad, chutney or pickles, depending on your meal.
Serves: 5/6
INGREDIENTS
1½ lbs of sausage meat
2 lbs puff pastry
1 large diced onion
2 tbs of mixed dried herbs
1 tbs of chilli powder
3 oz finely chopped walnuts
A generous grinding of black pepper
1 egg for glazing, beaten
METHOD
Heat the oven to 360 degrees F/180 C.
Mix the sausage meat, herbs, chopped onion, chilli powder and walnuts in a large mixing bowl. If you happen to have any leftover fresh herbs such as parsley, oregano, sage or other herbs that you like the flavor of, add those as well. It is all according to taste. Set aside.
Roll out your pastry on a cold, floured surface to approximately a quarter of an inch thick. Take your sausage meat mixture and shape into a long cylinder on the pastry, about a third of the way from one of the edges, leaving enough space at either end to seal the pastry.
Roll the short side of the pastry over the sausage meat, quite tightly. Seal all the edges with egg wash and fork the edges down for a nice pattern. Cut off the excess pastry, reroll, and use for decoration, perhaps in small leaf shapes along the top. Glaze all the outside of the pastry, including the decoration so that it is covered in the egg wash.
Place on a parchment or foil lined baking tray.
Bake in the center of the oven for about 40 minutes. When you remove the plait from the oven, you will see residual oil or fat from the pastry. Drain this off before letting the plait cool down. If you have a wire rack or other dish, remove the plait from the baking tray and place on the new clean dish. This will prevent the fat from reforming around the plait. Serve warm or cold, but it is more difficult to cut when it is too hot.