🌭 Italian Sausage & Peppers
Ingredients
- 1.5 lb Italian sausage
- 3 bell peppers
- 2 onions
- 4 hoagie rolls (optional)
- Garlic
- 2 tbsp olive oil (pantry staple)
- Salt & pepper (pantry staple)
Instructions
- Brown sausages in an oiled skillet; remove.
- Sauté sliced peppers, onions, and garlic until soft and sweet, 10 min.
- Slice sausage, return to the pan to finish. Serve on rolls or over rice.
Tips
- Brown the sausages whole and slice them afterwards. Slicing first means more surface area drying out and losing juices.
- Give the peppers and onions the full 10 minutes. They need time to collapse and sweeten — 5 minutes leaves them crunchy and raw-tasting in a dish that should be soft and jammy.
- Deglaze with a splash of water or wine after the sausage comes out. The browned residue in that pan is flavour you'd otherwise leave behind.
Substitutions
- Italian sausage
- Sweet or hot, both traditional. Chicken or turkey sausage is leaner, so add a little oil. Vegetarian sausages work if browned harder than seems necessary.
- Bell peppers
- Any colour; red and yellow are sweeter. Cubanelle peppers are the traditional choice and milder.
- Hoagie rolls
- Already optional — serve over polenta, pasta, rice, or on its own.
- Garlic
- Add it late, in the last minute with the peppers. Early garlic in a 10-minute sauté burns.
Storage & reheating
Keeps 4 days refrigerated and freezes 3 months — a good freezer dish, since the peppers are already soft so texture loss doesn't matter. Reheat in a pan or covered in the oven.
Common questions
Should I boil the sausages first?
No. Browning them and finishing them among the peppers cooks them through and keeps the flavour in the dish; boiling leaches it into the water.
Sweet or hot Italian sausage?
Both are traditional — sweet is fennel-forward, hot adds chilli. Using half of each is common and gives more depth than either alone.
How do I know the sausage is cooked?
160°F internally, or no pink at the centre when sliced. Returning the slices to the pan for a couple of minutes finishes anything underdone.