A sausage roll (or pigs in a blanket, toad in the hole, sausage in a nightgown, hotdogs, Hot Dog on a Stick, Pogo, corndog, French fry-coated hot dog, or bangers and mash) by any other name would taste as sweet, but the French sure have a way with words! Saucisson en brioche sounds much more delicious!

This dish comes from the Rhône-Alpes region of France where Lyon is the capital, and its sausages have always been famous.

The first part of this recipe is the sausage. I gathered all the ingredients I needed — even the sausage casing. I’ve never made homemade sausages before and the combination of ground meat and intestinal lining from same animal set my stomach a little off. Once it was sealed up in the refrigerator ready to cure, I was able to move onto the more interesting part of the recipe: the brioche.

The richest of all breads is pâte à brioche (BREE-ohsh), and only a small yeast step away from being a pastry. The word comes from old French, from broyer, brier, which means to knead. Made with lots of eggs and butter, it’s a rich and tender bread. Traditional brioche à tête has what looks like a head or topknot on top of a roll made using special fluted molds. You can make it as traditional bread in a loaf pan, or use it en croûte, as in this version. In this case, brioche surrounds above-mentioned homemade sausage.

Brioche is bursting with butter, making it a difficult dough to work with. It is best handled when cool. Also, since it is a soft dough, it is kneaded differently from stiff bread doughs. Maybe that’s why mine didn’t rise. I kept checking my dough every three hours, and it didn’t change or grow. A soft dough is worked gently, by being “gathered up into a loose ball with a pastry scraper, then picked up with the fingertips of both hands and slapped back down into the bowl.” (Le Cordon Bleu At Home)

The second time I made this, I adapted the recipe for brioche from Cookwise by Shirley O. Corriher. I had no problems with this recipe, except that I had to add extra flour since my dough was too wet. It turned out buttery, rich, and tasty.

Another tricky part about this recipe is making the sausage stick to the brioche since it has a tendency to pull away. The author of Cookwise suggests coating the sausage with egg-flour layers to glue it securely to the dough to prevent it from pulling away as it rises.

Now, given that I’d made the sausages several days ahead, and given that the expiry date on the ground meat was close, and the fact that my first attempt at making brioche failed, and the schedules of a family life, and other such excuses, I didn’t trust that the sausages were viable without risk of food poisoning. So, after all this labour, I took some pictures, took a small bite, and decided to not risk anyone else’s health and quickly disposed of my fancy, schmancy Saucisson en brioche.

Recipe: Sausage