Home > Categories > Food > Pastries > Oxford Sausage Roll review
The origins of the sausage roll are lost in the mists of history, but every good sausage roll has just one future... and it probably involves sauce.
Product reviews...
Ah the humble sausage roll, the time honored tradition of wrapping some meat in pastry and presenting it to the world as a sausage roll. This is Oxfords take on it. A snack or a meal that is up to you, but something different from a pie it sure is. And what did I think of this? Well I think I would pick a pie over a sausage roll most days of the week, and that's not to say this is a bad sausage roll, it's just that it is a sausage roll.
The pastry is good and is to be expected when eating anything with pastry Oxford makes, they have this down to a tee. The filling felt like it was really overly minced or processed and was just very plain, and I guess that sums up my thoughts about this product.
It's plain and edible and well is a sausage roll, I think it needed a injection of cheese, more seasoning or something to get it to raise the bar from where it is to something that is a bit more special.
The smell coming from the oven as my Sausage Roll from Oxford Pies baked had my stomach rumbling. True to the instructions it did take 40 minutes to heat right through from frozen. It is a long time to wait for lunch when you haven't had morning tea.
I have a history of wanting a sausage roll until I taste it, then I remember why I don't have them too often. This roll was no different. The dominant flavour was the sausage meat. I couldn't really taste anything else. It would probably be a hit with my onion hating 5 year old because although it contained onion I didn't see any or taste it.
I found the sausage roll left an unpleasant fatty feeling in my mouth. Although this didn't really suit me I know some blokes that would down a couple of these for lunch if given a chance. My rating on value for money should be disregarded as when I wrote this I didn't know the price.
I adore a good sausage roll, but they are increasingly harder to find, wirth the cost of quality ingredients going up, and the spare cash in the marketplace going down... so it was good to find a sausage roll that is fairly inexpensive, tasty, and filling enough that it will serve as a snack or as a finisher for a meal.
To trial this one, I decided to use it as the meat part of a meal, with some carrot sticks and asparagus spears gently fried in garlic butter, and some creamy mustard mashed potatoes. Yeah, the meals sounds quite posh until you add "...and a sausage roll..." but it was a great combo really. Despite being microwaved from frozen, the sausage roll stayed moist and tasty, without going soggy or chewy. I know the wrapper does not even offer microwave cooking instructions, so it's not advised because of the horrible things that pastry can do under microwave influence, but if you are careful and patient, you can actually do a good job and end up with very edible pastry.
Overall, though the filling of this roll wasn't really as top-notch as I would have hoped, it wasn't as full of junk as some of the cheap sausage rolls you can buy. I would have liked to have a bit higher meat content, and maybe some stronger spice flavours such as garlic and paprika, but for it's price bracket, it was quite acceptable indeed.
Sausage rolls are usually a big hit in our house. We have been known to buy the frozen party ones and have those for dinner. It's just one of those things that we do. I have had the Oxford sausage rolls before, because when they are in the pie warmer at my local dairy I can not resist.
For the purposes of the review, I cut this up into fours to share. It was easy enough to cut up, though the pastry did go everywhere. But that was to be expected since I didn't cut it up delicately. I basically hacked it up. My toddler picked her piece of sausage roll up first on her plate and happily tucked in. She ate about half, which didn't surprise me given the strong flavours.
The pastry on this tasted buttery, with a hint of onion. The meat inside was very flavourful. There is no indication of what meat it is on the packet, except to say sausage meat. However, given the flavour I would say it was largely beef. the onion is in there, and you pick that up in the flavouring of the meat. However, there are no large chunks of onion. Its just dense and meaty. Miss 6 described it as 'like a sausage'. "I LOVE IT" she yelled.
I don't like sausage rolls and any time that we get given some I always give them to the kids or my husband, they're more than happy to gobble it down.
Giving this my first bite I noted a nice onion taste to the sausage roll which I rather enjoyed. What was really good was that I didn't have a greasy oily after taste in my mouth which was huge relief. An hour later and I still didn't have a horrible taste in my mouth, a big plus.
My husband rather liked this but we both agreed that there was nothing special about it other than the fact that we had no greasy oily taste left in our mouths. This is does mean, though, that given a choice we would pick this Sausage Roll over any other.
This is a good serving size, even just half is good as a snack.
Sausage rolls have always been something I enjoy, but most of the time the meat in them was just too juicy and had some unusual flavourings in them, making them slightly less enjoyable. This one, on the other hand, was just awesome! The meat was nice, it had none of the bad flavourings that normal sausage rolls have, and it was one of the best things out of the load of pies that I got.
The meat had a good texture, it wasn't all moist like the ones I've had before were, it was firm, yet not chewy, and I could actually taste the meat, not any other spices or additives. It was easy to heat from frozen, which is how we got it, I just had to nuke it in the microwave for about a minute at full power. The one problem I've had with most sausage rolls is that annoying flaky pastry which just goes everywhere; there didn't seem to be much of that with this, the pastry was quite firm, somewhere around pie-standard, so I didn't have to brush myself off afterwards.
The overall taste was awesome, this has got to be the best sausage roll I've had, this would be a great snack for on the road or at parties. The fillings were quite firm, it was well cooked before it was frozen, and seemed to have less additives than most brands of sausage rolls. The pastry was delicious, and was firm enough to stop causing messes. Overall, I think that this is the brand of sausage roll that I will look out for in bakeries!
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