Breakfast Casserole Recipe - Laura Vitale - Laura in the Kitchen Episode 1001

Hi guys! I'm Laura Vitale, on this episode of Laura in the Kitchen I want to show you how to make a breakfast egg casserole, it's so unbelievably good, perfect for this time of year because if you're anything like me, you entertain a lot and then sometimes you happen to entertain at different times of the day, I've done brunch a lot of times and making a casserole works so incredibly well because you can assemble it the night before, pop it in the fridge and then in the morning all you have to do is bake it and you're good to go. So that's what I'm going to show you how to make today, it's really easy and simple, it doesn't require very many ingredients, so let's get started. The first thing I have here is some breakfast sausage, this is just bulk breakfast sausage, I need about a pound of that, and then I have some just regular old white sliced bread, you can take off the crust if you want to, I don't. You need lots of sharp cheddar, eggs of course, whole milk, some dried mustard, I've got some fresh chopped scallions and some salt and pepper. That is it, and it's so good. It makes kind of like a baked breakfast grilled cheese, it gives you that same sort of feel because it's cheesy, it's got bread in it, it's so good, you're going to love it. Let's get started, the very first thing I want to do is get a skillet nice and hot, and then to my nonstick skillet, I'm not going to add any oil or anything because I don't feel like it needs it, I'm just going to add my sausage and you just need to kind of break this up and cook it until it's completely cooked through, you want to give it some time because otherwise if you start to just breaking it up right now and then don't touch it again, it's going to all cook together and be one giant piece, so give it time to start developing some color. In the meantime, this is how difficult this recipe is. You take your baking pan, I've got a 9x13 inch baking pan here, you can butter it if you want to, I find that it doesn't matter, you can chop up your bread into bite sized pieces or you can do what I'm doing and just tear it, it does exactly the same thing. Some people like to take the crust off, some people like to leave the crust on. For a white sandwich bread like this, I just don't feel like taking the crust off is necessary because it's so soft, so that's what I'm going to do, I'm just going to tear this into pieces, keep an eye on my breakfast sausage and then we're pretty much going to pull the whole thing off. This looks fantastic, I would say it's about 99% of the way cooked through, that's fine it's going to go in the oven eventually. Now if your sausage renders off a lot of fat, you're going to need to discard it, mine didn't render out too much fat so I'm going to keep it in. And to it, now that I have it off, I'm going to add my scallions, I just feel like I need a little bit of green, a little bite of something fresh and it just adds so much yumminess to this, I love it. And then all you do is you just take your sausage mixture, you just sprinkle this all over here and you can always just sort of like move stuff around so that the sausage gets really well distributed, and you just set that aside for a few seconds because we just need to whip together our custard. To our eggs, I need whole milk, add that right in, and then you need some ground mustard, I read about adding ground mustard in a newspaper article years ago, we used to have, where I used to live, we used to have a local newspaper that used to run like a weekly food column and I used to be a part of that, and then one of the ladies that was a part of our food column, she wrote about a breakfast recipe, I can't remember what it was, and it called for custard and she added ground mustard to it, she told me that I should try it, I did and I have never looked back, it works really, really well here. Salt and pepper, of course, and then you just whisk all of this together, you can use a fork or you can use a whisk, I find that a fork works just as well. Adding half of the cheese to my custard, and then you just sort of pour this all over, and then what you do is you kind of just press down on the bread just to make sure that every piece of bread is well coated in the custard so that there's nothing, no dry pieces, then you take the remainder of your cheddar, you sprinkle it on top, and now the hardest part about this whole thing is that you have to cover it and you need to pop it into the fridge for about, I would say, a minimum of a couple of hours, but really at this point, if all you do at this point is you wrap this with plastic wrap and pop it in the fridge overnight, it's even better, and then all you have to do the next day is bake it. Now I'm going to just cover this, let it go in the fridge for about an hour or two, depending on how hungry I get and my patience, and then I will show you, then we'll unwrap it and we'll bake it. This baby was in the fridge for a few hours, now I've got my oven preheated at 350F, I'm going to pop this in for about an hour, it'll be beautifully golden, puffed up and delicious, and I'll show you what it looks like when it's done. A casserole was in the oven for 55 minutes exactly, I have let this cool for a few minutes because when it came out, it was super super hot, but when it came out, it's almost like a souffle, it's really really puffy and gorgeous and it does start to flat as it cools. I'm not going to cut this up too much because I actually have plans for this baby, but I'm going to get to this piece right back here, because I want you to see sort of what the inside looks like. Oh! It's hot! It's soft, it's fluffy, it's got that sausage, piece of that sausage right there, smells so incredible. Hot! Oh my gosh! If you love a breakfast sandwich, like if you love sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches, this is like that, but way way better, and the kind that can feed a crowd so so happily. Oh! I love this! I'm going to actually wrap this up and get ready to gift this to someone, which I will show you in a future video, go to LauraintheKitchen.com, get the recipe, make it for your brunch or your Christmas morning or any holiday morning that you want to use it for, it's perfect because it can be assembled the night before and bake it off right before you're ready to serve it. Hope you've enjoyed spending time with me and I'll see you next time. Bye bye!