Sausage Bread

Before I post about this recipe, I must warn you. This is the most addictive piece of food you will ever eat. Always make one more than you initially plan on because sausage bread has a tendency to disappear quicker than pizza at a weight-watchers meeting.

This is the ultimate food for football watching, holiday entertaining, drunk eating, late night munchies, and general hangover grease craving satisfaction.

It’s simple, and a very forgiving recipe… so you can cheat. That’s right, no high horse foodie stuff. No need to get “locally sourced” mozzarella, or pizza dough from scratch. You can make this with Polly-O and frozen dough and it will turn out just fine. Here’s what you’ll need:

PER LOAF:
– Pizza dough
– sweet Italian sausage meat (about 3 links worth)
– 4oz of grated cheese
– 1 cup fresh chopped parsley
– 8oz of mozzarella
– 1 egg (beaten)

I did some partial cheating when I made this yesterday. Here’s what I used:

Grated cheese– I used Pecorino Romano… I always have this in the fridge and use it liberally. No gourmet cheese here.
Chopped Parsley– I forgot to ask Mrs. Notafoodie to pick some up, so I used dried instead
Mozzerrella and Sausage– Procured from our local Italian butcher, Mitch. He makes the sausage on the premises and I believe sends out for the cheese. So, they were both great.
Pizza Dough– Also procured from Mitch. He keeps a few of them frozen at the shop.

A note on the dough- Normally we buy dough from a local Italian bakery on Friday morning. We pick up a couple of batches of fresh made dough for our “Homemade Pizza Fridays” (blog post to come soon on that topic). This week we didn’t have time so we opted for the still good, frozen dough from Mitch.

If you don’t have a local butcher or Italian bakery in your neighborhood, the first thing I would recommend doing is to reconsider your living situation. Think long and hard about how you can live some place with so little access to real food. Then go to your local grocery store and find some deep frozen pizza dough. Luckily, as I said, this recipe is very forgiving.

Here we go:

Take the sausage out of their cases and cook in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, stirring until sausage crumbles and is no longer pink. Remove and drain, I usually use a bowl with a paper towel in it

Unroll dough into a rectangular shape on a cookie sheet with some non-stick spray on it

Mix the sausage, the mozzarella, the grated cheese, the parsley, and most of the egg in a big bowl.

Spread the mixture evenly on to the dough

Roll it up…jelly-roll style, then turn the seam side down on to the baking sheet. Pinch or fold the edges to make sure that the loaf is sealed. Otherwise, you’ll have a cheese leak which is no fun to clean up.

Poke a few slits in the top with a knife to let the moisture escape.

Brush the loaf with the remaining egg.

Bake at 325° for 30 minutes or until golden brown.

Let this bad boy sit on a cutting board for at least 10 minutes before slicing in to it. Otherwise.. you guessed it… cheese leakage

Consider yourself warned- this is extremely addictive. In the history of the world, I have never heard any stories of a sausage bread platter that has gone uneaten. Leftovers of this do not exist. If you do not have amazing willpower, you might find yourself homeless, living in an alley behind a butcher shop, hoping for enough sausage scraps to make a small loaf.

Gotta run… I need to get just one… more… slice.
I swear… it’s my last one.