Pasties, pies and Wellingtons had been staring again at Robbie Knox on the bakery in Balham, south London. Then he noticed it.
A sausage roll. However then Robbie, a 48-year-old author and YouTuber, noticed the value…. a whopping £3.50.
‘This was 2010, and I bear in mind pondering it was outrageous,’Robbie informed Metro, ‘however then consuming it, it was the most effective sausage rolls I’ve ever had.’
As of late, although, Robbie has to pay barely greater than £3.50 for a sausage roll. Costs of certainly one of Britain’s most iconic snacks have skyrocketed in recent times.
To see simply how costly the common-or-garden sausage roll is, Metro visited 40cafés, caffs, bakeries, butchers and diners in London.
Of them, solely 15 offered the pastry, primarily in upmarket espresso outlets or practice station bakeries.
The costliest sausage roll we discovered gained’t be too stunning to any foodies studying this -The Ginger Pig.
The butcher’s ‘world-famous sausage roll’, because the signal outdoors its Borough Market stand reads, is £7.
West Cornwall Pasty Co. sells chunky sausage rolls for £6.39, with a smaller-sized one for £1 much less at its Waterloo Station department.
Rise & Bloom, an unbiased espresso store simply south of Hoxton, have a price ticket of £5.50 and is £6.50 on Deliveroo. Simply by Russell Sq., a department of Retailer Avenue Espresso additionally flogged a BBQ-glazed sausage roll for £5.50.
The speciality espresso store offered what tabloids dubbed the ‘world’s costliest sausage roll’ in 2023, at an eye-watering £7.20.
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The bakery chain, Gail’s, adopted on a technicality – £5.30 if you wish to eat in on the department in King’s Cross St Pancras, or £4.50 to go.
Two café franchises – F**koffee and Loafing – each promote chunky rolls sprinkled with herbs and spices for £5, the identical worth as the posh division retailer Harrods does.
The most cost effective sausage roll we discovered was at a kiosk inside Baker Avenue known as Treats, the place riders can seize a beef sausage roll for £1.70.
One other finances pork in a cover of puff pastry was Nibbles, a sandwich store by Angel, promoting them for £2.50.
Whereas Maks Information, a family-owned newsagent’s on Columbia Street, has an in-store bakery that sells the go-to breakfast merchandise for simply £1.99.
Greggs stays one of many most cost-effective locations for sausage rolls in London
All three are nonetheless a number of extra pennies than probably the most well-known sausage rolls within the UK – by the bakery large, Greggs.
A Greggs sausage roll as soon as value 85p – now it’s at the very least £1.25, in line with a Greggs worth tracker.
The precise quantity you’ll pay on your Greggs sausage roll depends upon the place you reside. Metro paid £1.55 for one outdoors Liverpool Avenue.
Why are sausage rolls so costly lately?
Primarily based on our intensive analysis, Londoners have three choices if they’ve a hankering for a freshly baked sausage roll: a cheap-ish one from Greggs or a pricier one from a complicated espresso store or a practice station stand.
Baked items are costlier for a number of causes, Ebony Cropper, a value of residing specialist at Cash Wellness, informed Metro.
‘The price of elements like pork, butter, and flour has all gone up due to world provide chain points, local weather impacts on crops and ongoing meals inflation,’ she mentioned.
‘On high of that, pasty outlets are dealing with greater payments for power, water and lease, alongside rising workers prices as a result of of the rise within the Nationwide Minimal Wage. All these pressures get “baked” into the ultimate worth.’
As cooks experiment with the tried-and-true sausage roll recipe, none of those high-quality elements come low-cost, defined Richard Worth, an expert grocery purchaser.
‘If you’re paying £5-£7 in a premium espresso store, you’re additionally overlaying the price of the atmosphere, the standard of espresso served alongside, the packaging and the perceived exclusivity,’ the founding father of on-line grocery store Britsuperstore informed Metro.
Prepare station bakeries additionally are typically costlier as they don’t have a gentle circulate of shoppers; quite, they’re ‘seize and go’ varieties, Vix Leyton, a client professional at Thinkmoney, mentioned.
‘This, coupled with the actual fact there’s a captive viewers, with out the time or the choice to buy round, means you’ll typically be paying a comfort premium for that pasty you had been daydreaming about between Sheffield and Stockport,’ she added.
What our reporter thinks?
Metro reporter Josh Milton was out and about for a complete day making an attempt the nation’s favorite pastry.
That is his tackle all of it.
I grew up in a cramped council property in Romford – even Sainsbury’s felt posh to me.
So the considered spending a fiver on a sausage roll brings me proper again to questioning why my household by no means went on vacation like the opposite children did.
But when there’s one factor that clocking 38,000 steps taught me, it’s that you just actually do get what you paid for on the earth of pastries.
{that a} Greggs sausage roll can be good, however you additionally understand it gained’t be dusted with herbs you’ve by no means heard of or full of fillings you may’t simply get within the grocery store.
The Greggs roll has and all the time can be my go-to, even now that I’m a vegetarian who can simply wolf down 4 vegan ones in two minutes.
But, if I’m within the temper to take a seat down and actually admire this beloved parcel of pastry that has been well-liked within the UK for hundreds of years, I do know I’ll should spend a little bit extra.
Not everybody can cough up a fiver for a sausage roll whereas they’re speeding to work, as Laurence, a 29-year-old residing in Hertfordshire, as soon as did years in the past as a prop employee.
For his YouTube channel, Lets Take a look at Laurence, he’s wolfed down the ‘costliest sausage roll’ within the capital (Harrods) and essentially the most ‘well-known’ one (Greggs, after all).
He informed Metro that sausage rolls being costly make sense – it’s London, in spite of everything.
‘However for now, I’ll proceed to purchase them,’ Laurence mentioned. ‘Staple meals and drinks must be protected against inflationary pressures in London.
‘Beginning with beer and sausage rolls wouldn’t be a nasty place to start.’
How can a sausage roll value £7?
The Ginger Pig iconic breakfast snack has 200g of meat and 100g of puff pastry, a spokesperson informed Metro.
‘There’s extra meat than most burgers plus the equal of a complicated croissant in each single one,’ she mentioned, including that the bakers add a ‘vaguely obscene amount of actual butter’.
‘Mincing, laminating, chilling…it needs to be executed correctly, no corners lower. Oh, and so they merely have to be loved heat.’
James Mitchell, the group head chef on the Jolene in Newington Inexperienced, informed Metro that the bakery’s rolls use ‘uncommon breed pork from Swaledale, a Yorkshire-based butchers’, known as Middlewhite and Oxford Sandy pigs.
‘The sausage meat is seasoned with pink wine, fennel seeds, garlic and black pepper earlier than being wrapped in Jolene puff pastry,’ they added. ‘The pastry is made with regeneratively farmed flour from Wildfarmed and cultured butter from the Property dairy.
‘The sourcing of the elements is vital to what we do and we really feel this actually reveals by within the sausage roll.’
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