Irish Sausage Rolls Recipe, Whats Cooking America (2024)

FAQs

What is the American equivalent of sausage rolls? ›

The closest I've found in The States is a Hot Dog type emulsified sausage wrapped in Croissant Pastry and baked. It's generally made from canned dough. And it's called…. Pigs In A Blanket.

Irish sausages are similar in composition, though there is one distinctive difference: British sausages are made with bread crumbs, whereas Irish sausages are made with rusk (a twice-baked bread somewhat like a savory biscotti).

What makes ours the best sausage rolls available in America? Buttery, scratch-made pastry—and sausages perfectly seasoned with thyme and sage by an award-winning, local butcher, cooked to a golden brown.

North American breakfast or country sausage is made from uncooked ground pork, breadcrumbs and salt mixed with pepper, sage, and other spices. It is widely sold in grocery stores in a large synthetic plastic casing, or in links which may have a protein casing.

If, after much searching, you find yourself without bangers (and without the proper equipment to make a batch yourself), then in a pinch substitute any sort of plain, fatty pork sausage. Bratwurst always seems closer to a proper banger than a mild Italian sausage in my mind.

A banger is a nickname that the British and Irish give to sausages. The nickname “bangers” originated during World War II, when rationing was common and meat was scarce. Bangers have two distinct characteristics – they have a much softer texture and are much less salty than their American and continental counterparts.

If you can't find sausage that is labeled specifically as “Irish,” I would recommend any bratwurst-type of sausage as a fine substitute. These Johnsonville sausages were delicious! If you do not find sausage labeled as “Irish,” I think bratwurst would be a good substitute.

The spices used also had different tendencies. Here, our sausages seem to be based on salt, pepper and sage as the main flavours. We all have our different additions but these are common. Irish sausages had a lot more herb content like thyme and rosemary.

I am guessing you have a situation where the sausage makers in Britain and Ireland have access to very high quality casings that are softer. Some of this may be due to the diet of or the breed of animals that provide the casings.

Although variations are known throughout Europe and in other regions, the sausage roll is most closely associated with British cuisine.

What country invented sausage rolls? ›

The sausage roll that you might recognise today probably began in France at the beginning of the 19th century …

Banger is a centuries-old traditional Irish recipe. They consist of lean and fat pork tossed with spices and herbs, which is encased to make a sausage. A banger is delicious with an herbal and peppery taste.

In the British Isles we have eleven native pig breeds, all of which are traiditionally used to produce wonderfully different tasting meat depending on where the breed is from and what it traditionally grazes upon.

British sausages being called bangers seems to be a historical legacy, a colloquial term left over from war time when sausages sometimes exploded in the pan when you cooked them. We started calling sausages bangers sometime during the first World War, it was a slang name for a sausage at the time.

Pigs in a blanket in the United States is a small hot dog or other sausage wrapped in pastry similar to a sausage roll in the UK, it is commonly served as an appetizer in the United States. The similarity in name with that of the UK dish pigs in blankets, which is a sausage wrapped in bacon, sometimes causes confusion.

Wrapping meat in pastry dates back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, but the modern sausage roll is thought to have originated in 19th Century France. Sausage rolls grew in popularity in London in the early 1800s as a cheap street food, and rapidly became a quintessentially British snack.