Recipe: These Sausage Rolls, From a Beloved Sydney Bakery, Were Once Voted Australia’s Best

The legend of Sydney's Bourke Street Bakery is built, in part, on this pork-and-fennel sausage roll. It’s so good, it pipped thousands of others across the country in a competition to find Australia’s buttery best.

“Sydneysiders are addicted to them,” write co-owners Paul Allam and David McGuinness in their cookbook, re-released this year to celebrate 21 years of the beloved neighbourhood bakery. “Sydney’s backyards are always alive with pork and fennel sausages rolling on barbeques, so we knew this sausage roll would be popular, but we never dreamed it would be this popular.”

Unlike your standard servo roll, this one starts with a proper mirepoix: onion, celery and carrot are cooked down until they’re soft and sweet, while fennel seeds and garlic add extra layers of flavour. It’s folded through lean pork mince, worked by hand before, then wrapped in puff pastry and finished with a scattering of fennel seeds.

The result is the standout roll that made this bakery famous – made in your very own kitchen.

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Bourke Street Bakery’s pork and fennel sausage rolls

Makes 12

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 1 hour 10 minutes

Ingredients

30ml extra virgin olive oil

6 garlic cloves, finely chopped

40g fennel seeds, finely chopped

4 thyme sprigs, leaves picked

150g brown onions, finely chopped

150g celery, finely chopped

150g carrots, finely chopped

1.2kg lean minced pork

40g dry breadcrumbs

20g salt

15g white pepper

1 quantity puff pastry

Egg wash, for brushing

Fennel seeds, for sprinkling

Method

Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add the fennel seeds and thyme and stir together for 1 minute, or until aromatic. Add the onion and celery and cook for 5 minutes, or until the onion has softened. Add the carrots and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring often, until the vegetables are mushy. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

Put the pork mince into a large bowl and add the cooled vegetables, breadcrumbs, salt and white pepper. Using your hands, mix the meat quite forcefully for 3 minutes to thoroughly combine (this will also work the protein in the meat). At this stage it is best to roll up a little ball of the meat mixture and cook it in a hot frying pan for 2 minutes to check the flavour. You may find it is too salty, however once the mix is encased in pastry the saltiness should even out. But if you cannot taste the salt at all then you need to add a pinch or two more.

Roll out the puff pastry into a rectangle, about 92cm x 32cm. Cut the pastry into six rectangles about 15cm x 30cm each.

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Divide the filling mixture into six even-sized portions. On a clean work surface, roll each portion out into a 30cm log with a 3cm diameter. Place each log lengthways in the centre of a pastry rectangle and brush one long edge with egg wash. Firmly fold the pastry over, pressing to enclose the log tightly, leaving the ends open. Cut each roll into two even-sized pieces and place on baking trays lined with baking paper, seam side down. Brush the top of each roll with egg wash and sprinkle with fennel seeds.

Reduce the oven temperature to 190°C and bake for 35–40 minutes, or until they are a golden-brown roll of steaming oozing goodness.

Images and text from Bourke Street Bakery by Paul Allam and David McGuinness, photography by Alan Benson. Murdoch Books RRP $49.99.