AI photoSausage and Bacon Breakfast Bake for a Crowd
A hearty make-ahead breakfast bake with bacon and sausages, perfect for feeding a big group.
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Ingredients
- 100 g Bacon
- 250 g Breakfast sausages
- 10 pcs Eggs
- 400 ml Milk
- 1 tsp Paprika
- 0.5 tsp Smoked paprika
- 25 g Sun-dried tomatoes
- 300 g Bread cut into cubes
- 100 g Broccoli cut into florets
- 75 g Cheddar freshly grated
- 1 tbsp Olive oil for frying and greasing the dish
- Salt to taste
- Black pepper to taste
- 1 bunch Parsley finely chopped
Steps
Heat a pan with a little oil and fry the bacon on both sides until nicely crisp.
Let the bacon cool on paper towel to absorb the fat.
Cut the sausages into pieces about 2 cm long and fry them in the same pan, until crisp and juicy.
Whisk together the eggs, milk, paprika, sun-dried tomatoes, salt and pepper in a bowl.
Chop the crispy bacon, then mix it with the sausages, bread cubes, broccoli and cheddar into the egg mixture.
Chill the mixture for at least 1 hour, or overnight.
60 minTransfer the mixture into a greased ovenproof dish.
Cover with an ovenproof plate and bake in a fan oven at 175°C for about 20 minutes.
20 minRemove the plate and bake for another 10-15 minutes, until the egg mixture has set.
15 minServe sprinkled with finely chopped parsley.
This is a strata, really — stale bread, custard and whatever meat you've got, baked into something between a bread pudding and a frittata. It belongs to that family of dishes invented by people who had bread going hard and eggs going nowhere, and refused to waste either. What decides whether it works isn't the sausage or the cheese, it's the bread: it has to be dry enough to drink the custard without collapsing into mush, and it has to sit in that custard long enough to actually drink it.
That's the whole trick of this dish, and it's why step 6 — the chill, the wait — isn't a fridge-tidying instruction, it's the method. Fresh soft bread thrown into egg and milk just slicks over and goes slimy in the oven, because the crumb is already saturated with its own moisture and has nowhere to put the custard. Bread that's a day or two old, or cut into cubes and left to dry a little in the air, has room. Give it the hour, ideally overnight, and the custard gets pulled right into the structure instead of pooling around it. Skip the chill and you'll get wet bread on top and rubbery egg underneath — the dish didn't fail, you just didn't give it time to become itself.
Some say you must use fresh bread for a "proper" bake, soft and springy — no, because that's backwards: soft bread is for eating, not for soaking. Stale bread is the correct bread here, the same way old rice makes better fried rice. You're not fighting staleness, you're using it.
The eggs and milk are the custard, and the ratio matters more than the flavourings around it — ten eggs to 400 ml milk gives you something that sets firm but still has give, not a rubber slab. If you use less egg or more milk, thinking it'll be lighter, you'll get a bake that weeps liquid as it cools, because there isn't enough protein to hold the water. Whole milk is the safe choice; if all you've got is the stuff for your tea, semi-skimmed will do, it just sets slightly less rich.
Bacon fried first, then sausage in the same pan with no fresh oil, isn't laziness — it's economy. The bacon fat left behind is better seasoning than anything in a bottle, and frying the sausage in it means you're not throwing away flavour you already paid for. Letting the bacon rest on paper towel afterwards isn't about crispness for its own sake, it's about not carrying a slick of fat into the egg mixture, where it would sit as oily patches rather than disappear into the bake.
Sun-dried tomatoes go into the egg mixture, not scattered on top, because their job here is to leach colour and a faint sweet-sour note into the custard as it sits — another reason the resting time matters. If you don't have them, a spoon of tomato purée stirred into the eggs gets you closer than a handful of fresh tomato would, since fresh tomato brings water the custard doesn't need.
Paprika and smoked paprika aren't decoration — sweet paprika gives colour and a round, mild base note, the smoked one brings the char you'd otherwise only get from a real fire or a griddle pan you don't own. Use smoked paprika alone and it turns bitter and one-note; use only sweet and the dish tastes slightly flat. Keep both, in that small ratio, and you get warmth without it tasting like liquid smoke.
Broccoli goes in raw, cut small, because the long bake cooks it through anyway — blanch it first and by the time it comes out of the oven it's grey and collapsed, all bite gone. Cheddar, grated fresh rather than bought pre-shredded, melts into the custard instead of sitting as separate clumps; pre-grated cheese is coated to stop it clumping in the bag, and that coating is exactly what stops it melting properly in your dish.
This feeds eight at a Sunday-roast pace — people helping themselves, not plated portions — so think of your ovenproof dish by volume, not by a tin size: it needs to hold roughly a litre and a half of mixture with room to rise a little. A lasagne dish or a deep roasting tray both do the job. And don't rush the final uncovered stage by cranking the oven hotter to save ten minutes — a custard this size sets gently from the outside in, and too much heat too fast gives you a set edge around a liquid centre, which no amount of extra time fixes once the outside's already overcooked.