Hot Sausage Baguettes Recipe

Well, it’s hardly a recipe, but hot sausage baguettes were the order of the day.  For these I used part-baked baguettes from Lidl, some ready-cooked cocktail sausages that I’d previously frozen and a splash of ketchup!  Sometimes I use sausages I’ve already cooked myself and then frozen, it’s often just as easy to cook a whole packet and freeze the leftovers if I’ve no specific plans for them all!

Now, I’ll admit that the picture looks “a little lacking” in the big snacks department, but that’s because I try to keep a rein on my meal sizes.  I could’ve used 2-3x the sausages and added some onions, but that’s just piling calories on where they’re not needed.

How I made this: 

I used my mini oven to bake the part-baked baguettes and reheated the frozen cocktail sausages alongside.

I wasn’t sure if the sausages would leech oil out, so I reformed the foil twist I’d frozen the sausages in to create its own little dish.  I wrap five cocktail sausages in a foil twist as a sausage portion as I figure, weight-wise, that five cocktail sausages are equal to one regular sausage.

These were cooked in the mini oven using the following mini-oven settings: 

• ~190°C on the temperature setting gauge
• Top and bottom heating elements both on
• Not pre-heated
• Tray on the bottom shelf position.
• Cooked for 9-10 minutes.

The baguettes were brown enough to eat after just 7-8 minutes, but the sausages had been frozen so I left it for 10 minutes.  Next time I’ll probably put the sausages in for 1-2 minutes on their own, then add the baguettes.  I keep notes each time I use my oven, so I can adjust the settings required over time to suit my tastes – it’s good to do this when you buy a new model of a kitchen gadget as you need to get used to how it performs and you can’t just rely on the old timings in your head from previous experiences.

The sausages were hot, just not really sizzling, I’d put them in frozen, straight from the freezer.

I always pre-slice my baguettes before I put them in the oven – I find it’s easier to cut them when they’re cold than trying to wrestle a crispy hot baguette and a knife.  I then sliced the sausages in half and squirted some ketchup on there – and, as I did so, I thought “maybe I should’ve used brown sauce”, I can never decide!

Menu Cost:

I keep the part-baked baguettes in the bread bin because they’ve a long shelf-life and are super-tasty.  These ones were from Lidl and cost £0.45 for a pack of two.  Each baguette I cut in half, so I end up with four halves of a baguette, at a cost of £0.11 each half.

The ready-cooked cocktail sausages will typically come in a pack of 40 for about £1.60.  I portion them up as eight packs of 5 sausages in foil wraps in the freezer, so one foil wrap is £0.20.

So, the cost of this tasty baguette was £0.11 + £0.20 + the cost of a little butter and a squirt of ketchup, so let’s call it £0.35.  A similar hot baguette from a catering van would probably cost you £1-1.20 and a shop might set you back £1-2 for the same thing!  Very frugal.  Using part-baked baguettes and the ready-cooked cocktail sausages means I can have a hot baguette on demand, on my plate, in just 10 minutes!

Five-A-Day?

Er, yeah …. OK, I’m not a big fan of this, but you can add a salad to the baguette to help towards your five a day – or even just a single, sliced, tomato.

If you’re cooking for one you can’t have everything in the fridge all of the time.  If I’ve got tomatoes in the fridge then I’d have used a tomato – I’d have baked it beside the sausages or just added it cold/sliced.  But, right now, I’ve run out of tomatoes.

My Zero Waste Policy means I have to eat everything I buy – which, cooking for one, restricts what you can buy.  You can’t have everything all the time.