I think it's pretty obvious given the subject of this blog that I love my food, however I am rubbish at cooking and baking. I do like to have as go though and pastry is not something that I've ever used before so when I was asked if I would like to review some Jus-Rol products I thought why not give it a try?
I think that Jus-Rol is a brand that most people will be familiar with when it comes to ready-to-roll pastry. They have been around since 1954 and they are the best selling pasty brand in the UK. I was sent some vouchers so that I was able to pick up a couple of products from the supermarket and I decided to go with their pastry sheets. I got a box of puff sheets and a box of shortcrust sheets which contained 2 sheets in each.
The pastry sheets come rolled in a blue plastic wrapper and you need to leave them to defrost for a couple of hours. I took one of each sort of pasty out of the freezer and popped in the fridge ready for when I got in from work. There was one slight problem and that was that I couldn't remember which pasty was which as they both looked identical!
I decided that I was going to make a pizza and some vegetarian sausage rolls but it was pot luck which was going to be puff pastry and which was going to be the shortcrust pastry. I can't have been the only person to have ever done this so one bit of feedback would be that there be some kind of indicator as to which pasty is in the roll, or different coloured wrapper to match the boxes.
Unrolling the sheets was very easy and for the pizza I just spread on some tomato sauce and added some grated cheese. It took around 15 minutes to cook in the oven and as it turned out this was the puff pasty. It made a lovely thin and crispy pizza which Mr Review Addict was most impressed with. I think next time I will be a bit more adventurous with my toppings but I really loved the puff pasty as an alternative pizza base.
So my sausage rolls turned out to be shortcrust pasty! I had some left over Quorn sausages from my review that I did the other day which I cooked for about 5 minutes in the oven. I then wrapped in the pasty and cooked for a further 15 minutes. I actually really like shortcrust sausage rolls, they just seem a bit more comforting and I was quite impressed with my veggie version.
VerdictThis is the easy way to do pastry and I was pleased with how well my pizza and sausages rolls turned out. I will definitely try to be more experimental with pasty in the future, I was sent a lovely little recipe book along with my vouchers so I will be working my way through that. Jus-Rol Puff Pastry sheets are around £2 for a box of 2 rolls and the Shortcrust Pastry Sheets are around £2.50. It's also worth mentioning that Jus-Roll also do a Bake-It-Fresh dough range which I will be looking out for, I seriously need the Pain Au Chocolat in my life!
