These sausage rolls are so very Dutch and loved by almost everyone!
Sausage filled rolls are much loved in Holland. They go by the name of ‘worstenbroodje’ made with bread dough or ‘saucijzenbroodje’ when made with puff pastry. The type of rolls in this recipe are often called ‘Brabantse worstenbroodjes’ after the Dutch province where they are eaten a lot. There are yearly contests to crown the best ‘Brabantse worstenbroodjesbakker’, the best sausage roll baker, and bakers devoted to exclusively baking sausage rolls!
For this recipe we are going to make a starter named a poolish. A poolish is a type of wet sponge usually made with an equal weight of water and flour and an extremely small amount of yeast and NO salt. Making a poolish helps bring more taste and strength to your bread while using less yeast.
Ingredients for the Poolish
100 g wheat flour / bread flour
100 g / 100 ml water
0,5 g instant yeast
Making the Poolish
In a bowl stir together the flour with the water at room temperature and the tiny amount of dry yeast. Mix it well until you have a homogeneous slurry that looks like very thick batter. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and let the prefermenting begin. After 4-6 hours it is ready for use. If you have to skip making the poolish (because you forgot or don’t have the time or do not want to) you can add the 100ml water to the milk in the recipe, add the 100 g flour to the 400 g of flour and increase the amount of instant yeast to 7 g. But it is worth making the poolish, because you do get better flavor and texture!
Ingredients for the Sausage Rolls
makes 16
The prepared poolish (see explanation above)
400 g bread flour
8.3 g salt
approx 200 ml lukewarm milk
5 g instant yeast
1 tsp honey
30 g fresh dairy butter
Sausage Meat and Spice Mix
200 g minced beef
200 g minced pork
1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp paprika powder
1/4 tsp 5 spice mix
1/2 tsp sea salt
black pepper (20 turns with our mill)
8 allspice/piment berries (use pestle and mortar to grind)
1 egg
toasted breadcrumbs of two sandwiches
1 to 2 tbsp of vegetable oil
Making the Sausage Rolls
Preheat your oven to 200ºC / 390ºF
First make the sausage meat by combining all the ingredients and turning the meat into 16 sausages of about 35 g each with a length of about 10 cm / 4 inches. Cover and put aside until needed. You do not have to bake or brown the meat, it’s going in raw!
Now we make the bread dough. In a mixing bowl scoop the poolish, then add the flour, salt, yeast and honey and 2/3 of the milk. Gradually add the rest of the milk while mixing and when the dough comes together and starts forming a ball, add the butter. If you use a KitchenAid type mixer, mix for about 7 minutes, longer by hand. Make sure the dough is not too sticky or too dry. Aim for a bit tacky, which means that when you poke the dough with your dry finger it should stick for a second but then peel of as you remove your finger. Leave to rest for 15 minutes.
Divide the dough into equal parts of about 50 grams and make rolls. Press the rolls with your hand until slightly flat and roll them out to about 15 cm / 6 inches length.
Lay a sausage on a piece of dough and fold it around the sausage and pinch the sides together (if it doesn’t stick well, use some water). Then roll carefully with both hands so the fold were you pinched it is smoothed over.
Lay the 16 rolls on a baking tray, cover with clingfilm and leave to prove for 45 minutes. Before they go to the oven you can give them an egg wash to get a shiny brown surface (beat an egg with a tbsp of milk and carefully brush the tops of the rolls)
Bake them in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes (always depending on your oven so keep a close eye). Take them out and leave to cool very slightly but make sure to eat one as soon as possible. You can put them in the freezer when completely cooled and keep them for at least a month. Thaw them and give them a second chance by putting them in the oven for 5 to 7 minutes to heat through and get crispy on the outside. Putting them in the microwave will make the bread soft.
Evert says
youtu.be/OmY_rKNttPw
Call it a hobby, recently we bought a Rofco, to produce more each time.
Weekend Bakers says
Heel erg leuk om te zien Evert! Dank je voor het delen, ik lust wel zo’n ‘brooike’. En heel handig dat gebruik van de pastamachine, krijg je toch een wat mooier resultaat zo te zien.
Marieke
Weekend Bakers says
Hello EB,
Thank you very much for sharing all this information with us. It sounds like a great idea and we are surely going to try your method too! Hartelijk gefeliciteerd and we hope you will have a wonderful birthday party / verjaardag!
Happy baking,
Marieke & Ed
EB in TX says
My wife is from Norord-Brabant (Tilburg – Breda area). A couple of times a year I make these just for her. Her birthday is tomorrow, which since she is Dutch, is obviously a very big deal . So today was a good time to turn out a batch. I used your dough recipe with the poolish — I had never used a preferment with worstenbroodje — and it works beautifully. I made my own version of the sausage, since this was formulated to her spec’s several years ago. But I did try Rob Damen’s piping and freezing method, and it was the easiest ever. In the past I started with hand forming (a messy pain), or extruding from my sausage stuffer which is too big for just a pound – a bit much lost and awkward without a second to help. The piping thing really works. I didn’t have a piping bag with a round tip big enough , so I just used a one-gallon (about 3.8 l) zip-top food storage bag and cut a bottom corner at a 45° angle for a one-inch (2.54 cm) opening. It worked like a champ! I piped 4 long sausages onto a lined half-sheet pan, 16″ each by 1-inch in diameter, put the pan in a freezer for about 2 hours, then cut the long sausages into 4-inch segments for 16 total. A plus here is you can fabricate, freeze, then cut the sausages and keep them frozen until you’re ready to bake — even a day or week ahead.
A couple of caveats — if you wrap and roll with stiff, solid sausages if the naked sausage shapes aren’t perfect (some of mine weren’t) then the final shape will be that of the not-so-perfect sausage. Second, if the sausages are still frozen or very cold when you wrap them, proofing will take a bit longer — the whole tray of wrapped and proofing worstebroodje got quite cold as they sat proofing. Also baking may take a bit longer — after 15 minutes with little color development I dropped the temp to 375 °F (from 400) and total bake time was 27 min’s. I suspect all of this could be resolved simply by removing the frozen individual sausages, separating and sorting them carefully on a sheet pan, and letting them sit at room temp for about an hour (guessing here) before wrapping them up. They should still be quite cold, but will be a bit more pliable allowing shape to be more uniform, as well as finish thawing completely earlier in proofing. It’s a very neat way to make these, but next time I’ll take the little cut frozen sausages out just before I start the dough mix.
Melanie says
“I had never used a preferment with worstenbroodje — and it works beautifully. I made my own version of the sausage, since this was formulated to her spec’s several years ago”
Just wondering what her specs are? We are trying to make our own this year as the ones we get from the Dutch store taste nothing like what my Opa’s did. I’m anxious to show my dad this one as it has the most spices I’ve seen so far in a recipe for them on line.
Marieke says
Hi Rob,
Your method described is something sure worth trying. Our sausage roll making is indeed a bit messy (up till now :-)).
More recently I have been trying to perfect the art of making rough puff pastry. I filled the pastry with sausage meat and apple (so more like our saussijzenbroodjes but with a bit of apple freshness ). They turned out quite tasty too.
Thank you very much for your elaborate addition. Much appreciated by us and hopefully lots of other sausage roll lovers too.
Happy baking,
Marieke
Rob Damen says
Hi, I have made worstenbroodjes a few times now, using several types of dough, I am certainly going to try this dough recipe the next time. Looking at it I think its the same dough as the one you use for making fluffy rolls. (I made those today by the way, only using my leftover flours (100 gram volkoren, 100 gram meergranen and 200 gram ordinairy flour). They were a great success, I baked them for 17 minutes, but the next time I will cut the cooking time back to 15 mins.) Back to the worstenbroodjes now. When I made worstenbrood for the first time, I found it rather difficult to get the meat in the dough in a neat manner, and getting a nice straight worstenbroodje. Of course, it’s a hand made product, so there is no real need for them to be super staight, but I always want to make my bread and pastries look like they do at the baker. So what I do in order get nice straight sausages and as a result of that, straight worstenbroodjes, is the following: I prepare the meat according the recipe used, get a plastic disposable piping bag, fill it up with the prepared meat, making sure there is no air in the meat. Get a square cutting board or something equal that fits in your freezer and cover with baking paper. Try making a sample first in order to get sausages of the desired thickness. incorrect samples can be put back in the piping bag. Once the correct thickness is acquired I start making sausages three times the lenght needed for one sausage (or two times depending on the size of the board). I keep on doing this until all meat is used. Once done, I line up the super suasages and make sure they are paralel, and touching eachother. Subsequently I cut the supersausages to the desired length, without moving them. The result is a board full of the same size sausages cuddled together. Wrap the board in plastic or use a plastic bag and put it in the freezer until completely frozen. When you are ready to put bread and meat together, remove the sausages from the freezer. You will notice that your sausages are frozen together, but you can separate them easily (like breaking bread :)). The advantage of a frozen sausage is that you are able to wrap the dough nice and easy around the meat, and once you have packed the meat into the dough, you can roll the worstenbroodje between hand and counter easily, securing the meat thoroughly in the dough without ruining your worstenbroodje. I usually make like 36 worstenbroodjes using two ovens and a total of three batches, so the meat is defrosted before it goes into the oven. Of course you need to prepare the meat a few hours or days before making the actual worstenbroodjes, but it helps me getting goodlookin’ delicious worstenbroodjes!