This Sausage and Rice Casserole is a quick one pot dinner recipe that punches a quick meal for dinner above its weight in terms of effort vs results. It adds a ton of flavour that’s absorbed by the rice.
Tastes like Jambalaya, minus the cajun flavours, and much faster to make! They pan fry to a beautiful golden colour, leaving behind a stack of tastebud-tickling good stuff in the oil which then forms the primary flavouring for this rice meal. And therein lines the beauty of this recipe: the exact flavour you end up with in the rice depends on the sausages you use. All are slightly different, some smokier than others, with slightly different seasonings. Smoked sausages are sausages that have exposed to burning wood smoke, which imparts a fabulous smokey flavour. They are commonly cooked sausages like Polish kielbasa, andouille, and the kind you see in American barbecue.
Smoked sausages can be sliced neatly, as depicted in the photo of kransky sausages below, unlike fully raw sausages. It doesn’t matter whether the smoked sausages you get are cooked or uncooked because they get cooked through in this recipe. Even raw sausages will work in this recipe because they too leave a ton of flavour in the pot! You can’t really slice them though because the meat is raw and squishy, so just cut into small chunks.
It will clump a little more. The recipe won’t work as written for: brown rice, paella or risotto rice, wild rice, quinoa or other speciality rices. Essential aromatics for the flavour base. The spice used to flavour the rice. We don’t need much flavour added into this dish because the smoked sausages add so much!