One-Pot Sausage and Bean Casserole
Sausages browned whole and cut up afterwards, so they hold their shape, with butter beans that go in late enough to stay whole.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 55 min
- Total
- 1 hr 10 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- Cereals containing gluten
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Casserole
To finish
Method
Casserole
Heat the oil in a wide casserole and brown the sausages whole over medium heat, turning them, for about 8 minutes.
Leave them whole for now. Sausages cut up raw shed their filling into the sauce and lose their shape; browned first and cut later, they stay as sausages.
Lift them out and add the onion and peppers to the fat, cooking for 10 minutes until soft and starting to colour at the edges.
Add the garlic, paprika, oregano and tomato purée and stir for 2 minutes.
Pour in the tomatoes and stock, scrape the base, and bring to a simmer.
Cut each sausage into three on the diagonal and return them with any juices.
Simmer uncovered for 25 minutes, until the sauce has thickened and darkened and no longer tastes of raw tomato.
Add the beans and cook for a final 8 minutes, just long enough to heat them through. Longer and they break up into the sauce.
To finish
Stir in the vinegar off the heat and taste for salt.
Scatter with parsley and serve with bread to get the sauce off the plate.
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What to expect
- Taste
Sweet from the peppers and the reduced tomato, savoury from the sausage fat, with smoked paprika sitting over it. The vinegar at the end is what stops it being one flat sweet note.
- Aroma
Sausages browning first, then sweet pepper and paprika. A homely rather than a dramatic smell.
- Texture
Three things doing different jobs: the firm bite of the sausage, the soft slip of the pepper, and the floury creaminess of the butter bean.
- Sound
A steady open simmer for half an hour, which is the sound of the sauce reducing.
- How the flavour moves
Sweetness first, then smoke, then the savoury sausage, and a sharp finish from the vinegar.
- Serve it
Hot, and it holds heat well in a bowl.
- Goes with
Crusty bread, and nothing else needed. Mash if you want it more substantial. A light red or a cold beer.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
One wide casserole. That is the entire point of it.
- When to make it
A weeknight.
- Best season
Peppers are best in late summer, which is when this is at its sweetest.
- You know it is done when
The sauce reduced enough that a spoon drawn through leaves a brief channel, and darkened from bright red to brick.
- And it feels like
Sausages holding their shape with a firm bite, beans whole and creamy inside, sauce thick enough to cling.
- Food safety
Sausages are minced meat, so the centre must be properly cooked — 75C/167F is a comfortable target and no colour test is as reliable in a sausage. They are well past it after browning plus 33 minutes in simmering sauce, but check a thick one if in doubt.
- Where it goes wrong
- Cutting the sausages before browning, so the filling escapes into the sauce.
- Cheap sausages, which fall apart and thicken the sauce with rusk.
- Adding the beans at the start, where half an hour breaks them up.
- Simmering with the lid on, so the sauce never reduces.
- Leaving out the vinegar, which is what makes it taste finished rather than sweet.
- If it does go wrong
Thin: keep simmering uncovered; it will get there. Sweet and flat: vinegar, then salt. Sausages falling apart: they were cheap, or they were cut raw. Beans mushy: they went in too early.
- Making it ahead
Better the next day.
- Keeping it
Three days in the fridge and better on day two.
- Reheating
A pan on low with a splash of water.
- Freezing
Three months. The beans soften slightly and nothing else changes.
- Leftovers
On toast, or under a mash lid as a pie.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly in a wide enough pan. Brown the sausages in two batches.
- Substitutions
Chicken sausages or good vegetarian sausages both work; brown them the same way, and vegetarian ones need a gentler hand as they are more fragile. Passata for the tinned tomatoes.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten from the rusk in most British sausages, plus sulphites, which are a standard sausage preservative, and celery from the stock. Gluten-free sausages are widely available and behave identically. Dairy free, egg free and nut free as written.
- Shopping for it
A butcher's sausage is noticeably better here. Look for 80% pork or higher on a supermarket pack.
- Keeping the cost down
The one place not to save is the sausages. Everything else in the dish is tins and vegetables.
- Sustainability
Pork's footprint is roughly a fifth of beef's per kilogram, and half the protein here is already coming from beans, which is about as low as protein gets. Going to six sausages and two tins of beans is barely noticeable and is a genuinely better ratio. Good vegetarian sausages work in this recipe without any other change, which is not true of most sausage dishes.
- Nutrition
Good fibre from the beans and a lot of vegetable. Sausages carry the fat and the salt.
- Worth it?
Two small changes to the order of operations, and the sausages stay sausages.
Where it comes from
- Origin
British weeknight cooking, on a European template.
- Also called
None fixed; sausage casserole is what it is called.
- Said out loud
Straightforward.
- What the name means
A casserole is both the pot and what is cooked in it, which is a useful ambiguity for a one-pot dish.
- History
Pulses cooked with pork are among the oldest peasant dishes in Europe, and the great regional versions — cassoulet, fabada asturiana, feijoada — are day-long affairs built on dried beans and cured meats. Tinned beans, which appear in British kitchens in quantity through the twentieth century, are what make an hour-long version possible, and it is a genuinely different dish rather than a shortcut to those.
- Why it matters
Firmly weeknight. It is the sort of dish that exists in every British household in a slightly different form and is rarely written down.
- When it is eaten
A weeknight, or feeding people who arrive hungry and are not fussy.
- The traditional way
Browning the meat, softening aromatics in its fat, and simmering with a pulse.
- How it changed
Dried beans and hours became tinned beans and one hour.
- Regional variations
This site has Fabada Asturiana, which is the Spanish original of this idea and is worth cooking when there is a day for it.
- How this version differs
Sausages browned whole and cut afterwards, and beans added at the end rather than the start. Both are corrections to the standard version, in which the sausages disintegrate and the beans go to mush.
- Sources and credit
None.
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British
Stews
Main courses
Dinner
Pork