Transforming a childhood favourite, these flaky and savory rolls are plant-based, featuring greens as the star ingredient. With a simple, delicious filling, and using prepared puff pastry, these Green No-Sausage Rolls taste luxurious and vaguely virtuous at the same time, and are very hard to stop eating after just one!
First off, there is no sausage in this recipe! Despite this fact, I could not bring myself to omit the word from the title as it conjures such distinct childhood food reminsinces. Growing up in Sydney, Australia, sausage rolls were an ever-present after school or anytime snack. Like Jamaican patties in Toronto, which populate hot cases across the city in corner stores and take out joints, sausage rolls, with their cylindrical pastry cases and minced sausage filling, were always fragrantly lurking in what seemed like every other store. They were cheap, familiar, instantly edible, flaky, and oh so savoury, although goodness knows what unmentionable ingredients they were actually filled with.
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Ingredients
I haven't eaten sausage rolls in decades since becoming a plant-based eater, their siren song calls from within my mind even after all this time. As an adult eater, although I have savoured many puff pastry delicacies, nothing quite satiated the sausage roll flavour centre of my brain until I started making my own version. This recipe, while clearly not attempting to become a dead ringer for the rolls of my childhood, still manages to deliver its own memorable and scrumptious satisfaction, albeit with greens as the star filling.
Here, only a few simple ingredients are needed to make these moreish, anytime rolls: fresh greens, green onions, feta, shredded mozzarella, eggs, prepared puff pastry, with toasted sesame seeds and nigella seeds for the topping.
Variations
This is a great recipe to play around with - honestly, you can wrap just about anything in puff pastry and end up with something delicious. However, this particular combination hits all the right notes - greens forward, with enough cheese to bind it all together without being overtly cheesy or greasy, subtly seasoned with dried and fresh herbs, and beautifully encased in lofty, crisp pastry decorated with savory seeds and flaky sea salt.
Our household always has odds and ends of various greens kicking around the fridge, and during the warmer months we have our backyard urban mini farm contributing greens as well - sometimes not enough of any one variety to make something specific, but enough combined together to make these rolls. Feel free to use whatever greens you have on hand or prefer: spinach, mustard greens, kale, and swiss chard in any combination will work beautifully. Other edible greens, such as the leafy tops of kohlrabi, broccoli, radish, and daikon can also enter into the mix if you have them.
As a note, I don’t recommend using baby spinach on its own, as it doesn’t have enough body and its flavour can be a little unidimensional - a mix of deep greens with their various flavour notes, from mineraly to slightly bitter, is what makes this green filling complex and distinct.
You can also play around with the cheese you use, although the recipe’s called for combination is my particular favourite. If you wish, try swapping out part or all of the mozzarella for cheddar, gouda, or a hard goat cheese, and the feta can be replaced by ricotta or chevre - whatever you have on hand really.
Substitutions
If you are vegan, you can also omit the dairy cheese and substitute with vegan cheeses. To omit the egg, simply remove it from the filling, and use plant milk as a pastry wash. If you’re going this route, make sure to check your pastry is not made with butter as many puff pastry brands are butter based.
Method
Once you have made these rolls for the first time, you may find yourself making them as often as you crave them, which might be a lot! To start with, fresh greens are shredded and cooked down with green onion. Once the filling is cooled, grated mozzarella, crumbled feta, fresh and dried herbs, an egg for binding, fresh lemon juice, and seasoning are quickly mixed up ready for filling the puff pastry.
Next comes the preparation of the rolls, which is quite straightforward. For this recipe, only remove the defrosted puff pastry from the fridge when you are ready to fill and prepare the rolls to bake. If your pastry sticks to their parchment paper base or somehow undergoes accidental aesthetic injury (sometimes I do leave my pastry out too long and things get a little wonky), don’t worry, puff pastry has a wonderful way of puffing up and hiding all sorts of faults. My most hideous creations have come out of the oven looking only slightly less glorious than their perfectly prepared counterparts.
If any stickiness is getting to you or becomes unworkable, you can also place your pastry at any stage back into the fridge to firm up again, and you will find it complies more fully with folding and crimping once it is chilled. Many recipes call for chilling the prepared and filled puff pastry before putting it into the oven - as this apparently gives you the best possible rise, but I almost never do that to no ill effect.
Once your pastry is rolled out portioned into four sections (this recipe uses two sheets of pastry for a total of 8 rolls), the filling can be divided and added, mounded into a log shape onto the middle of each section of pastry, and the pastry rolled over ready to crimp.
Using a fork, the half inch or so edge of pastry on one side is crimped by applying gentle pressure.
Then comes the final step, applying egg wash with a brush, and then the final toppings. If at all possible, don’t skip the nigella seeds that adorn the top of the rolls - the little black seeds add unmissable flavour, and you’ll find that you can use them in all sorts of other recipes once you have them on hand. Once sprinkled with seeds and optional flaky sea salt, the rolls are ready for baking, and then luckily, eating!
The Food Find
The Food Find ingredient in these rolls is nigella or kalonji - tiny, black, teardrop shaped seeds, about the size of sesame seeds, that impart a delicious oniony and herbaceous flavour to any dish that they adorn. Nigella seeds are are easily confused with other similarly appearing seeds, sometimes mislabeled as black cumin seed, black caraway, or even onion seed, but to make sure you are actually buying nigella seeds check that the package is labelled nigella or their Urdu name kalonji. Look for nigella seeds or kalonji at any Indian or South Asian grocer, Middle Eastern grocer, online specialty vendor, specialty spice shop, and at some health food stores. Find out more about nigella, where to find it, and ways to use it.
Eating
This recipe makes 8 moderately sized rolls - I can easily eat two in one sitting, so my small family of three can eat most or all of these Green No-Sausage Rolls in one day. As the rolls bake, your kitchen will fill up with the most appetizing aromas of buttery pastry adorned with fragrant seeds, making the hardest part of the receipe waiting for the rolls to cool down enough to eat! Once they are out of the oven and cooling, I often find them disappearing one by one throughout the proceeding hours well before any set meal time.
Green No-Sausage Rolls are a snack or light meal in their own right and they’re perfect right out of the oven, or equally as pleasing at room temperature. Make them in the earlier part of the day and enjoy them at a picnic, for lunch, as a snack in hand, or whip them up in the later afternoon; add a crisp green salad to the side, and call it dinner!
Getting Ahead
If you want to prepare part of this recipe in advance, as I often do, you can make the filling a day or two before (just don’t add the beaten egg yet). On the day you wish you to eat the rolls, just add the egg to the filling and as as a pastry wash, as written in the recipe, then simply finish filling and baking the rolls.
Storage
If you do happen to have any rolls leftover, make sure they are completely cooled before you store them in the fridge for a day or two at most - they can be reheated in a moderately warm oven for about 10 minutes, to crisp up the pastry and warm the filling, before enjoying.
Green No-Sausage Rolls
Ingredients
- 1-2 teaspoons olive oil extra virgin
- 3 green onions finely sliced
- 250 grams or (10 oz) mixed sturdy greens washed and finely shredded (approximately 10 cups when shredded, not packed) any preferred combination of spinach, swiss chard, mustard greens, and kale etc.,
- 1-2 teaspoons water
- ½ cup feta finely crumbled
- 1 cup mozzarella finely grated
- 1 egg beaten, divided, see below
- a pinch or two of dried mint
- 2 tablespoon fresh dill finely chopped
- a squeeze of lemon juice
- salt and pepper to taste
- 2 sheets prepared puff pastry defrosted according to package directions, and kept cold in the fridge until ready to fill and prepare
- nigella seeds, sesame seeds, and flaked sea salt for sprinkling (optional although recommended)
Instructions
- Defrost your prepared puff pastry in advance, as directed by the package instructions, and leave in the fridge until ready to use.
- Heat a non-stick pan over low medium heat. Add olive oil, then the green onions. Saute for about 3 minutes until tender.
- Increase the heat to medium, and in the same pan, add finely shredded greens and 1 or 2 teaspoons of water, and sauté until tender, approximately 5 to 10 minutes depending on which greens you are using. Put hardier greens like kale, chard, and mustard greens in first, followed by spinach, if using, for the last 3 or so minutes of the cooking time. Stir occasionally while sauteing, making sure that nothing sticks to the pan and that the greens are cooking evenly. Add salt and pepper to taste, and when greens are tender, move the pan off the heat and reserve until cool.
- While your greens are cooling, set your oven to 400°F and prepare 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.
- Add the shredded and crumbled cheese to a large mixing bowl, followed by about ¾ of the beaten egg (reserving about ¼ of the beaten egg off to the side to glaze the pastry rolls with). Add in the cooled and cooked greens, the dried and fresh herbs, squeeze in some lemon to taste, and mix gently together until you have a vaguely uniform mix.
- Unroll the puff pastry with the paper wrapping it is packaged in - I usually leave it on that paper while I prepare the rolls and I often bake it on that paper too with a silicone mat underneath. If your puff pastry doesn’t come rolled in paper or you don’t want to bake it on the paper it is rolled in, unroll it onto the prepared baking sheet as the filled rolls are hard to move.
- Cut the first rolled out pastry sheet into 4 even sections/rectangles. Take about ⅛th of the greens and cheese mixture and mound it evenly into a log shape onto the middle of one of the sections of pastry. The filling should be spread from top to bottom edge of each section. Repeat until you have all 8 rolls prepared.
- Pull the unfilled side of the pastry to the other edge so that the filling is hidden. Using a pastry brush, glaze the tops of each roll with the reserved beaten egg.
- Using a fork, crimp the edge of the rolls, letting your fork go right up to the edge of the filling. Repeat on all 8 rolls. Sprinkle each roll sparsely with nigella seeds, more thoroughly with sesame seeds, and finish with a light sprinkle of flaked sea salt.
- Put your tray(s) into the oven for 20 minutes, until the rolls are puffed and golden brown. Let stand for 5 minutes and then move to a rack to cool. Eat as soon as you dare !
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