Today's Dish October 2026

5 October 2026

Christmas Test Kitchen #1: The Sausage Roll That Became a Caterpillar

Halloumi, caramelised red onion, fennel, a little fig — and some unexpected assistance from M&S.

Christmas started in our kitchen on a grey Monday in October. Not because we had suddenly decided to put the tree up. Not because we were playing Christmas music. And definitely not because anything outside looked particularly magical.

It was cold, grey and exactly the kind of day that made staying indoors with something warm in the oven feel reasonable. We had two days off together, a kitchen full of plans and one idea we had been talking about since the morning: halloumi and caramelised onion sausage rolls. That would be Episode One of our Christmas Test Kitchen. Simple enough.

We have made sausage rolls for years. We have made versions with cheddar, caramelised onion, chutneys, cranberry and whatever else Christmas convinced us belonged inside pastry.

This time we wanted to know what halloumi would do. Would it melt? Would it disappear? Would it become too salty? Would it give those little chewy, savoury pockets that make you reach for another sausage roll before you have properly finished the first one? There was only one way to find out.

So we put the aprons on. And everything began extremely seriously.

First: the onions

We started with three medium red onions. They looked enormous once sliced — an entire purple mountain on the chopping board.

Into the pan went:

3 medium red onions

20 g salted butter

a tiny pinch of salt

1 teaspoon brown sugar

That was it. We originally thought we might need olive oil as well, but once the onions started softening in the butter, it was obvious that they did not need it. So we did something that sometimes gets forgotten when writing recipes: we changed the recipe according to what was actually happening in the pan.

The onions cooked slowly until soft, glossy and dark burgundy. Then we added the brown sugar and let them become properly sticky and caramelised. Three onions became an almost comically small amount. Kitchen mathematics is cruel. We had hoped to make enough for the sausage rolls and still have plenty left for halloumi flatbread and cheddar toasties later in the week. The ground had other ideas.

We weighed what we had. Eighty grams went towards the sausage rolls. About one and a half tablespoons remained for whichever future sandwich wins the argument. Next time, if we want leftovers, we are using five onions.

Then came the Christmas bit

To the 80 g caramelised onion we added: 1 teaspoon fig, apple and balsamic preserve.

We had considered more. We tasted it. One teaspoon was enough to make itself known without turning the sausage filling into dessert.

After tasting the finished rolls later, we think two teaspoons would probably be even better for this amount of sausage meat — still subtle, but a little easier to find amongst everything else. That is for next time.

The whole point of testing early is being allowed to change your mind.

Then came the halloumi

Half a 250 g block — roughly 125 g. We patted it dry and cut it into small pieces.

No oil. No herbs. No salt. Nothing. Into a dry pan it went.

At first, nothing much happened. Then suddenly: pop. Pop pop. Pop pop pop pop. Halloumi popcorn.

Apparently the moisture had decided to leave dramatically. We kept moving the pieces around until they had little pale-golden patches, then took them out before repeating a previous kitchen incident in which halloumi went from “nicely browned” to “charcoal specimen” while our attention was elsewhere.

This batch survived. It cooled beside the onions. So far, Christmas Episode One was looking rather competent. This did not last.

The sausage filling

We used:

454 g pork sausage meat

80 g caramelised red onion

1 teaspoon fig, apple and balsamic preserve

about 125 g lightly browned halloumi

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1½ teaspoons M&S Posh Dog mustard

black pepper. No extra salt.

The fennel seeds created their own little kitchen problem because our mortar and pestle did not move with us. So we improvised. Fennel seeds went between kitchen paper. The meat tenderiser came out. Tap. Tap. Bash.

Important lesson from the ground: put a chopping board underneath unless you want your kitchen worktop decorated with little hammer marks.

We were not trying to make fennel powder. We only wanted the seeds cracked enough to release their flavour. Some broke. Some stayed whole. Some became tiny pieces. Perfect. Then everything went into the sausage meat.

Hands in. Mix. No gloves. This is our kitchen, our dinner and our actual life. We wash our hands before and afterwards. We are not going to manufacture a pair of influencer gloves simply because photographs are being taken.

The mixture looked good. Dark ribbons of caramelised onion. Little pieces of halloumi. Fennel everywhere. Mustard running through the meat. This was the point where we were feeling rather pleased with ourselves.

And then the puff pastry entered the story.

Enter M&S Handcrafted All Butter Puff Pastry

We had deliberately bought the all-butter pastry. It sounded like the better choice. Plenty of butter. A short ingredient list. Ready rolled. Exactly the sort of thing that makes you think: Yes. This is the good one.

We took it from the fridge. It already felt strangely soft. We mentioned it. Back into the fridge it went while we finished the filling. We took it out again. Still soft.

We cut the sheet lengthwise into two long strips, exactly as we have done with sausage rolls many times before. The cold sausage filling went on. And then the pastry started behaving like something we had never encountered before. It softened. It stuck. It stretched. It stopped behaving like puff pastry and began behaving more like something attempting to return to liquid form.

We stopped. Back into the fridge. Again. Surely that would fix it. It did not.

By the time we tried to fold the pastry over the filling, there was almost no structure left to work with. And this was not our first sausage roll. It was not our first puff pastry. It was not even our first cheap puff pastry. We have used supermarket pastry before without this happening. The kitchen was not hot. The filling was cold. The pastry had been refrigerated repeatedly because we noticed early that something felt wrong.

And still: structural collapse.

There were photographs. There was disbelief. There was some language not suitable for our Christmas recipe page. There were also tears. Because sometimes you can know perfectly well that something is only pastry and still feel furious when you have spent hours carefully building a recipe, photographing each stage and trying to make something good — only for one component to disintegrate in your hands.

We considered going back out and buying another sheet. We considered trying to rescue the meat. We considered several things that become surprisingly serious when you have been standing in a kitchen since morning.

Eventually we decided: No. We were baking the disaster. The prehistoric Christmas caterpillars

We patched the pastry around the sausage filling as best we could. There was no beautiful crimped edge. There was no elegant cylinder. There would be no magazine photograph of neat identical sausage rolls lined up beneath a sprig of rosemary.

Instead we created two long objects best described as: prehistoric Christmas caterpillars.

We cut them into sections. Brushed them with beaten egg. Scattered nigella seeds over the top. And put the whole archaeological excavation into the oven.

At first they looked pale and slightly tragic. Then, slowly, something unexpected happened. They browned. They puffed — a little. The tops became glossy. The nigella seeds looked lovely. Some pieces, viewed individually and with enough optimism, could almost be described as rustic.

Viewed as a whole tray? No. Absolutely not. They were magnificent monsters. And by this point we had moved from crying to laughing so much that our stomach hurt. Good thing Christmas testing started in October. Imagine discovering this at eleven o’clock on Christmas morning.

Then we tasted them

And this is where the story changed again. Because underneath the pastry disaster was a very, very good sausage filling. The meat was juicy. Savoury. Properly seasoned.

The fennel was there without dominating. The mustard sat underneath everything rather than announcing itself. The caramelised onion amount was exactly right. The tiny fig note worked, although next time we would increase it slightly from one teaspoon to two. And thank goodness we added no salt. Between the sausage meat, salted butter used for the onions and halloumi, the filling already sat close to the upper edge of how salty we personally like food. Adding salt because “recipes need salt” would have made it worse.

Sometimes leaving something out is as important as putting something in. The halloumi was the only part we would change. Not necessarily by adding a lot more. The problem was distribution. Because we used little cubes, one bite might contain halloumi while another had none at all. When halloumi appeared, it worked. When it did not, there was no way of knowing it was supposed to be one of the main ingredients.

Next time we would probably cut it much finer, or perhaps use a mixture of very small cubes and coarsely grated halloumi. That should spread it through the filling without increasing the salt too dramatically. Maybe 125–140 g. We would be cautious about going much higher before tasting again.

But the sausage mixture itself? We wanted another one immediately. That was the verdict. Not polite “yes, quite nice.” Not “interesting.” We wanted to eat it. And if that filling had been wrapped in crisp, flaky pastry the way a sausage roll should be? We think we would have had something seriously good.

So what was Episode One? A failure? Yes. And no.

The pastry experiment failed. Spectacularly.

The sausage filling succeeded. Spectacularly.

Which makes our first Christmas Test Kitchen recipe perhaps the strangest category we have invented so far: an unsuccessfully successful sausage roll.

And M&S Handcrafted All Butter Puff Pastry has earned its place in the story — not as a recommendation, but because this particular pack, in our kitchen and under the conditions we photographed, became extremely soft and difficult to handle despite repeated refrigeration and cold filling.

We cannot tell you from one pack why that happened. We can tell you that it happened. And we can show you. That is enough for us. We are not abandoning sausage rolls.

Actually, today gave us more ideas. A British version with cheddar and caramelised onion. A French-inspired one, perhaps Comté and apricot rather than the predictable brie. Spanish with Manchego and quince. Greek with feta. Something Mexican-inspired, after we research the flavours properly rather than throwing chilli into sausage meat and calling it Mexico. We may have accidentally created an international sausage-roll experiment.

But Christmas has other things waiting too. Roast potatoes. Cauliflower cheese. A roast. Brussels sprouts that deserve something better than being boiled into little green sadness balls. Dessert.

Plenty of time. Because it is only October. And that, it turns out, is precisely the point.

Test Christmas before Christmas. Make the mistakes when nobody is waiting at the table. Find out what actually works. Cry over puff pastry if necessary. Then laugh when it comes out of the oven looking like a prehistoric caterpillar. And eat it anyway.

Because beneath today’s absolute visual catastrophe, we found a filling worth keeping.

Christmas Test Kitchen, Episode One: failed successfully. And we are only getting started.