Sausage and Vegetable Tray Bake

The sky is the limit when it comes to choosing your vegetables for a tray bake. Whether you do a veggie sausage mix or go fully vegetarian, the only limit is your imagination. You can use root vegetables, kale, beans & pulses, and whatever else you can imagine baking together with herbs, spices, oil, butter, garlic, and other flavour enhancers. Note that some vegetables need a longer cooking time than others. So, make sure that you cut, for example, carrots or potatoes into smaller chunks as they cook slower than soft vegetables such as cauliflower or broccoli.

Do you also often have a few tomatoes, a lonely carrot, and other random vegetables in your fridge by the end of the week? No worries: cooking up a tray bake like this sausage and vegetable bake makes the perfect rescue for your leftovers. Grab the leftover vegetables from a week of afternoon snacks and lunch boxes and use the sausages from Sunday's brunch or last night's BBQ and transform it into a delicious sausage and vegetable bake. Sausage and vegetable bake is a perfect excuse for challenging and broadening your cooking skills as you can experiment with many alternative combinations and flavours. Carrots and onions are usually found in most kitchens, but maybe you have something different? Or why not spice up the regular vegetables with a new herb or combination of spices? It is all up to you, cook!

Fry the sausages in Lurpak® butter over a low heat to prevent them from splitting, whilst creating a lovely brown caramelisation. Lightly squeeze the lemon over the vegetables before adding the lemon halves to the tray bake. This will accentuate the colour of the red onion and prevent the fennel from discolouring. Keep the garlic cloves in their skin to prevent them from burning. The high sugar content in garlic means it could burn before the rest of the vegetables are fully cooked. To keep your onion wedges intact, do not remove the bottom root area before chopping into wedges. You can use other vegetables for this recipe, including sweet potato, aubergine, squash, etc. If you want to add softer vegetables such as broccoli, add these later in the cooking process so they do not burn. Choose vegetables in different colours to make the sausage and vegetable bake look extra appealing and festive: red onions, yellow lemons, purple and orange carrots, beetroots, green herbs, and fiery red tomatoes. It will make your tray bake a rainbow of colours that everyone wants to dig into.

A tray bake is simply a tray with your favourite foods that you bake in the oven. It is one of the easiest ways to use whatever you have in your fridge. You only need a tray that fits in your oven, and then you simply bake it to make a delicious side dish or dinner like this sausage and vegetable bake.

You can use everything in a tray bake. The classics are savoury vegetables, herbs such as thyme and rosemary, and meat such as sausage or chicken. In this recipe we make a sausage and vegetable bake, but you can also make it vegetarian by using halloumi instead of meat. You can also add spicy curry paste, hoisin sauce, or tomato sauce to transform it into an Indian, Thai, or Italian-inspired tray bake.

Both hard and soft vegetables are great for tray bakes. It is a good idea to use both, so you have different textures. Use onions, carrots, courgettes, leeks, tomatoes, fennel, potatoes, sprouts, green beans, mushrooms, lemon, bell pepper, asparagus, and other types of veggies, legumes, and kale. You can get inspiration from our recipe for sausage and vegetable tray bake, or you can make your own version.

We believe from fresh is best but there is no problem in cooking pork sausages or any other sausage from frozen. It is the same approach as with a thawed sausage if they are not too big. If you are using bigger size sausages, place them in the tray, cook them in a preheated oven for about 5-7 minutes and then add vegetables and bake everything together for the remaining time.

Cauliflower is ideal for almost everything. Boil it, fry it, or cook it – everything works, which means that you can tray bake it as well. When tray baking cauliflower, you bake it like every other vegetable and protein with oil, spices, and everything you want to add to the tray.

Broccoli is perfect for oven-roasting so you can use it with your other veggie mixes to create a savoury and delicious tray bake. If you want a bit of crunch to your broccoli, you can add them after 5-10 minutes. If you like them nice and soft, you just bake everything together in the tray from the start.