We're reaching back into the treasure trove of Williams-Sonoma tonight with an entrée: Italian Sausage with Arrabbiata Sauce and Polenta.The recipe has two distinct phases: making the polenta and making everything else. The focus on grains is for good reason, because, as it turns out, real, Italian-style polenta is hard to make! The preparation requires 35 to 40 minutes and constant stirring. Unless you want to check "make honest-to-goodness polenta" off your bucket list or are looking for a good arm workout, we suggest substituting the 5-minute variety. Doing so will cut your cooking time by more than half and, if our experience is any indication, you won't miss a thing!
The next step is browning the sausage, which is a simple task. To avoid crowding our sausage links, we browned 4 at a time for 10 minutes (for a total of 8 links, or 20 minutes cooking time). This left a brown, spotty coating on the bottom of our pan, but not to worry if this happens to you - the next step will take care of the clean-up.
After moving the browned sausages to a plate, it's time to sautee the veggies! This recipe employs some of the more ubiquitous (and, thus, lower cost) vegetables in your produce section: onions and green bell peppers. The sautee is performed at a medium heat for 10 minutes, and the release of water from the vegetables makes short work of deglazing the pan.
In goes the arrabbiata sauce and the sausage, and together they simmer for another 10 minutes. (You'll notice from our ingredient line-up that we opted to use our own favorite bottled sauce, rather than make an extra trip to W-S.) Once the flavors have melded, remove the pan from the heat and serve on a bed of whichever polenta you decide to concoct.
This recipe was phenomenal, and a great departure from everyday Italian pasta dishes. Furthermore, there's a lot of room to make this dish healthier by 86-ing the cheese or the butter from the polenta or using chicken sausage.
Have you tried this dish? Tell us what you think in the comments!
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ReplyDeleteThis is the only polenta I have had before. It was yummy. Did you make the "scratch" version or the instant? Any idea how it compares to the tube?
We've never used the kind that's packaged in a tube, but we have used quick-cooking polenta many times before. Last night was our first attempt at making polenta completely from scratch, and our verdict was that it was too similar to the instant stuff to be worth a blistered thumb! Thanks for the recommendation - next time, we'll have to try the tube!
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