Dan Pelosi (aka @GrossyPelosi) grew up in the kitchen, cooking with his Italian-Portuguese family. This self-deprecating, self-proclaimed “meatball” evolved from weekend cook to full-on recipe guru, dishing up resources and delightful puns (“this too shall pasta,” “pumpkin to talk about”) on his website. He shares his recipe for sheet pan sausage and peppers … and potatoes and onions with us here. 

Ingredients

Serves 4
  • 6 Italian sausages, sweet or hot
  • 2 red bell peppers, sliced into strips
  • 2 small onions, sliced into wedges
  • 5 white or yellow potatoes, peeled and sliced into coins (optional)
  • 1 tsp fennel seeds
  • Olive oil
  • Red-wine vinegar
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Red pepper flakes
Cookware Used
Sheet Show
One Half-Sheet Pan & Two Quarter-Sheet Pans
$90$85
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Jacobsen Salt Co.’s Flake Finishing Salt
$15
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Stir Crazy
3-Piece Nested Mixing Bowl Set
$95
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I learned this technique a while ago from my grandfather. I really want everything to be super crispy, but there's not enough room on the pan for each piece to have the space, and the sausage needs to cook for less time than everything else. If you cook the sausage on top of the vegetables, there’s too much going on and the grease from the sausage messes it up. With two trays, you never have to worry about either of them. You can cook your vegetables and your sausage, and you put the sausage and all of the drippings on top of the vegetables. It’s perfect.

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F.
  2. Add red bell peppers, onions, and potatoes to a bowl.
  3. Add salt, pepper, fennel seeds, red pepper flakes, olive oil, and red-wine vinegar. Stir to coat, then mix evenly and place onto a sheet pan.
  4. I put red-wine vinegar on everything so it gets that vinegary, sweet caramelization. I also put fennel seeds on this. Obviously, they’re in the sausage, but it's nice to have them in the dish as a textural thing.
  5. Place in preheated oven and bake for 30 minutes.
  6. Meanwhile, slice sausages into 1-inch chunks and coat in olive oil. Spread out on a separate sheet pan and set aside.
  7. After your vegetables are in the oven for 30 minutes, pull them out and flip them over while moving them around the tray. Place back into the oven for 30 more minutes.
  8. At the same time the veggies go in for their second cook, place your sausage in the oven on a different rack. Allow 15 minutes to go by, then pull out your sausage and flip it over and move around the tray. Place back into the oven for 15 more minutes.
  9. When the 15 minutes are up, your sausage should be ridiculously crispy on the outside. Remove sausage from oven.
  10. After checking on your sausage, check on your vegetables. They have been in the oven for an hour now and should be nice and crispy and brown. You can keep them in as long as you want here! But an hour is usually the sweet spot for me.
  11. Once you have your veggies where you want them, add your crispy sausage to the pan of crispy veggies and get them all acquainted.
  12. Before serving, you can throw everything back in the oven to heat through for a few minutes, if needed.

I love making this dish with the Holy Sheet because we just eat out of the pan. I don't know why you would want to take sausage and peppers out of the pan with all of the gorgeous drippings and everything and then put it in something else. The Holy Sheet is beautiful, and it feels more special than your silver sheet pan — it’s functional, but it’s also a “serving pan” for me.

This batch is gone — my roommates ate it all already. But if you have leftovers you can repurpose it the next morning with some eggs, and it's genius.

Photos by Paul Quitoriano