Sausage Bread Recipe

Name: Sausage Bread Recipe
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 1 h
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 6-8 serving(s)
Ingredients: 2 lbs of ground Italian sausage; 2 medium sized green bell peppers; 2 loaves frozen bread dough (Or make your own dough from scratch); 2 slices bacon

Submitted by Tim_John

"Overall preparation and cooking time approx. 1.5 hrs. Well, about 6 hrs. if you include the bread dough rising time.Important note about making the sausage bread with homemade italian bread dough instead of frozen dough. If you want to make the sausage bread with the home made Italian Bread dough instead of the frozen, check out the Sausage Bread with homemade Italian bread recipe which combines this recipe for sausage bread and my Italian Bread dough recipe. It's more work but is so worth the effort!"

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Ready In:: 1hr 30mins
Ingredients:: 4
Serves:: 6-8

ingredients

2 lbs of ground Italian sausage
2 medium sized green bell peppers
2 loaves frozen bread dough (Or make your own dough from scratch)
2 slices bacon

directions

You will want to start to let your dough rise.To keep this simple and easy get frozen bread dough all ready to go, just needs to rise. you will have to plan ahead for this recipe to allow the bread dough to rise for about 4-5 hours.
To start the dough rising. You remove the frozen dough and place it on a greased cookie sheet and cover with a kitchen towel. I like to spray the cookie sheet and towel with oil first so it won't stick later. Try to find a warm moist place to let the dough rise. In the winter this can be hard to find. So if all you have is a cold dry place, you can do the following to get a warm moist place. In this case you will put you frozen bread dough on a greased microwavable platter and cover with kitchen towel. Boil a cup of water in the microwave, then quickly remove the cup of water and put in your dough. Let it sit in there for about 4-5 hours. No peeking, just let it sit.
After the dough has risen, you will now need to work the dough into long rectangular pieces to make your loaves. Throw some flour on your "clean" counter. Then work the dough with your hands. You don't need to knead the dough, you just want to start spreading it out with you hands. You may have to sprinkle a little bit of flour on the dough while you are working with it. This is OK, but not too much. You will have to work with it a bit, push, pull, spread, smack, whatever it takes. You will get to a point when you will need to switch to a rolling pin to finish off the process.
Be careful not to spread the dough to thin, you need some thickness to handle the meat filling. I usually end up cutting a regular sized frozen bread loaf in half to make two sausage bread loaves.After the dough has been prepared and is ready for filling, you will now need to make the Italian sausage and pepper filling.
First, take a the two slices of bacon and cut them up into small bits with some scissors. About 1/4" peices if you can. Fry up the bacon in the pan until you get a lot of nice bacon grease. Now add the ground Italian sausage and continue to fry. (If you can't find ground Italian sausage then you can get regular linked Italian sausage and remove the guts from the skin and use that.) Cut up 2-3 medium sized green peppers and throw them in with your sausage half-way through browning. Brown until the sausage gets a nice dark brown look and the peppers are well sauteed into the mix. When done, drain out all the grease, then place the meat and peppers onto a plate that has several paper towels on it to further drain the meat. Let this sit long enough to cool.
This would be a good time to preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.After the meat and pepper filling has cooled, you will now put this on top of the dough. Spread out the filling onto the dough while leaving enough room on the sides to wrap the dough around the filling.
Make sure you seal all the side up well so the meat is well sealed. Then with a fork, poke a bunch of holes on the top of the loaf to allow for steam venting during bakingBeat a couple of eggs into a bowl and use this as a glaze Brush a "little bit" of egg over the loaves. This will help you get a nice golden brown look to the bread. Now, place the loaves in your preheated oven and cook for 40 - 50 minutes.When done baking, let the loaves cool on a cookie cooling rack.
For presentation, I like to slice up the loaves into small pieces and then place them on a platter like you see below. This way they are nice and easy to grab and eat. This makes a great appetizer!