Pretzel Style Sausage Rolls

My Oktoberfest recipe for this year!

My wife has never been a fan of my original sausage roll recipe unless I take the time to trim all the casings off. This has always seemed a little too time consuming for me, so I don't and she doesn't eat them if I make them for a party. This time I just started with a pound of sausage meat and that made the whole thing much easier.

When I was coming up with this recipe I did some research on egg washes and discovered that doing an egg wash with just a beaten egg yolk gets you a deep brown color when baked. When you add a nice serving of large grain salt, it can give puff pastry a pretzel like exterior.

Ingredients:

2 sheets of puff pastry
1lb of pork sausage meat
2 tbsp maple syrup
1 egg yolk, beaten
salt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400

Roll out the sheets of puff pastry. I like to use a rolling pin to smooth any creases, I think it makes it easier to roll in the end. Divide the ground sausage into 4 equal portions.

Take one portion and place it on the narrowest edge of the pastry sheet and form into an even log that stretches along the entire edge. Brush the sausage with some of the maple syrup.

Carefully roll the puff pastry around the sausage and right before the pastry would overlap, brush the bit that would overlap with a little egg yolk to seal it. To make sure the roll has a flat bottom, before I seal it up, I lightly dock, or poke with a fork, the piece that will overlap. This collapses the layers of pastry and keeps them from rising as much. This is mostly a cosmetic decision but I find that it makes the whole batch turn out more even and uniform looking.

Cut the roll off from the remaining sheet. Each roll should take half a sheet, feel free to stretch the dough or roll it out thinner if you find that you don't have enough space.

Repeat for the remaining sausage portions. When they are all rolled, lightly brush with the remaining egg yolk and then sprinkle liberally with large flake salt. If you can get pretzel salt, even better.

Cut the logs into 6 equal portions. I shallowly score the tops twice with a knife, not deep enough that it goes through the pastry, so that they don't expand too much. Again, this is a personal preference that helps the finished product look nice and uniform.

Bake on a greased or parchment covered baking sheet for 15-20 minutes until dark golden brown.

To make the dip, combine equal amounts of maple syrup and mustard. Enjoy!

 If you are interested, here is a great place to find some great info on egg washes and how they work and what they do

Kaiser Wiener

Well it's October so you know what that means, pumpkin spice everything! Well, yes, but it's also Oktoberfest! So, I'll be putting out a couple recipes celebrating classic German flavors that go perfectly with a cold pint. Let's start off with something I actually came up with last year, that I affectionately call my Kaiser Wiener.

My goal was to come up with a dish that contained as many prototypical German things as I could, and, outside of using a pretzel roll, I think I've done pretty well.

This recipe calls for a slightly obscure dried meat called speck. Speck is a smoked German version of prosciutto. Like prosciutto, it is great raw with cheese or wrapped around melon or asparagus, but when it's fried it cooks up like bacon. If you can't get your hands on speck you could use prosciutto, but I'd recommend very thinly sliced bacon.

The ingredients listed below are per serving so you can scale easily for any size gathering. Also, it is a one skillet method that minimizes clean-up.

Ingredients:

1 club roll
1 tbsp unsalted butter
1 German style bratwurst
1 tbsp vegetable or olive oil
¼ c speck, cut into thin strips
1 tbsp German mustard
¼ c sauerkraut, well drained*

Directions:

Heat a cast iron skillet over medium heat for a few minutes until water sprinkled on the surface boils and skitters away. Butter the inside of a club roll and toast, butter side down, in the skillet until lightly brown and toasted. Lightly frying in butter helps create a moisture barrier that will help maintain the integrity of the roll when wet toppings (ie. sauerkraut) are introduced.

Set the toasted buns aside and then brown the bratwursts in the skillet until lightly browned on all sides and heated through. Evacuate from the pan.

Pour in the oil and then add the speck. Fry the speck for 3-5 minutes until lightly crisped and browned before removing from the pan and draining.

To assemble, spread mustard on the inside of the bun, layer on the sauerkraut, place on the bratwurst, and cover with the speck. Serve with a nice cold pint of amber and enjoy!

*When I say well drained, I mean I wrapped the sauerkraut in paper towels and squeezed it out. Anything less and you get a very soggy roll even after it has been lightly fried in butter.