Italian sausages baked slowly with mushrooms and tomatoes until they're so tender you could cut them with a spoon. This is a cheap, one pan meal that'll feed a crowd and just might be my favorite sausage and mushroom recipe. There's lots of different ways to and make it your own and improvise-today I'll walk you through it.

Back when I was sous Chef of Il Vesco Vino in St. Paul we cooked fennel sausage slowly in tomato sauce so it could be served quickly on a sandwich. We served not one, but two whole sausages in a type of Italian pocket bread with mozzarella cheese. It was a little excessive.
At the end of the shift the leftover sausages were the stuff a line cook’s dreams were made of. Cooked for hours until nearly falling apart, the sausage imbued the sauce with flavor and fat, becoming spoon tender like a pot roast and so addictive they could be traded for goods and services.
Chef's Tips and Variations
Tips
- Use canned, whole peeled tomatoes or tomato passata (strained pureed tomatoes).
- Browning the mushrooms and sausage is the key to the deepest flavor.
- Loose, ground sausage won't have the same tender pot roast effect as sausage links.
- The tomato sauce gets infused with flavor and is one of the best parts of the dish.
- Many mushrooms can be used here (or omitted entirely) and each variety will be a little different. Below is a version I made in 2023 with black velvet boletes and leatherback mushrooms.
Variations
There's so many ways to vary this It's hard to keep track of the different ways I've made it.
- In the video I demonstrate using frozen hen of the woods and fresh shiitakes, but you can substitute dried mushrooms and their soaking liquid.
- Pork sausage is my favorite, but turkey sausage or chicken sausage are fine too.
- If you have something like bratwurst, adding light beer instead of wine to the sauce is a good variation.
- You can serve the sausages whole, but they're also great sliced up and made into sausage and mushroom pasta sauce.
- Omit the mushrooms and make sausage and peppers. Cook three medium-diced bell peppers and onions until tender, folding them in at the end of cooking.
How to Make It (Step-By-Step)
The first step is to squeeze the seeds from a large can of whole, peeled tomatoes. Next strain the juice from the can, add to the squeezed tomatoes and puree them into a smooth sauce. This is known as tomato passata in Italian cooking. You don't have to get every seed, just try to get most of them. Cheaper canned tomatoes can be very seedy and too many seeds can ruin the sauce.
Next brown a pound of Italian sausage links in a pan, remove them and add half a pound of mushrooms. Cook until the mushrooms are browned, then add thinly sliced garlic and cook until golden.
When the garlic's starting to brown around the edges, deglaze the pan with white wine, add the tomato puree, browned sausages and a ladle of chicken stock or water.
Cover the pan and bake for an hour or until the sausages are spoon-tender. From here they can be served right away or can be refrigerated and reheated and served in many different ways.
One of my favorite ways to serve them is with polenta, pasta, or fried potatoes. Below they're pictured with an heirloom ground corn from Romona farms in Arizona.
Related Posts
Slow Baked Italian Sausages with Mushrooms
Equipment
- 1 10 inch braising pan with high sides
Ingredients
- 1 lb Sweet Italian sausage or hot Italian sausage or your favorite sausage. Up to 1.5 lbs can be used.
- 1 clove Garlic large, thinly sliced
- 2 Tbsp Cooking oil Divided
- 8 oz Fresh mushrooms, thickly sliced or quartered or substitute 1 oz dried, rehydrated mushrooms *see note
- Kosher salt to taste
- Fresh ground black pepper to taste
- Grated parmesan cheese to taste
- 1 32oz Can whole peeled tomatoes
- 1 Splash Dry white wine
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 325 F.
- Heat a tablespoon of the oil in the pan and brown the sausages well over medium high heat. Make sure not to burn the drippings in the pan.
- Remove the sausages, add the mushrooms and cook in the drippings until browned. Add a little extra oil if needed to help them brown.
- Push the mushrooms to the side of the pan. Add the remaining oil and the garlic and cook until the edges turn golden.
- Deglaze the pan with the wine.
- Add the tomato puree, chicken stock and sausages to the pan, bring to a simmer on the stove, then cover and bake for 1.5 hours, or until the sausages are very tender.
- If the pan threatens to dry out, add some water to adjust the consistency.
- Double check the seasoning (It should be fine as sausage is salty). Serve the sausages whole, or cool and cut into links for a rustic pasta sauce.
- They're great served with pasta, polenta, mashed potatoes or even wild rice. Garnish with a dusting of grated parmesan.
- Any leftover sauce and sausage is worth it's weight in gold. It's great tossed with a bowl of noodles, used on a hot hoagie, or as a condiment.
Hortense
Great work, babe!
Al Chomica
This is a very nice combo to work with indeed and allowed us to loosely follow the recipe. We only had a smidge of leftover smoked tomato sauce so I added some Clamato cocktail juice to extend it. Mushrooms were the leftover stems from an Oyster Mushroom grow log and the sausages were a superior Pepper Sausage from a local farmer. Plus, because it was Robbie Burns Day we tossed in a couple rounds of Haggis from the Scottish butcher and these were really complimentary. Better than the sausage actually because it was already soft at the onset. I tossed in a big handful of raw hazelnuts that were exceptional in the smoked sauce, especially when they soaked up the sauce and got cooked soft. Served alongside a thickish Bajan pumpkin soup and chickpea noodles were used to soak up the saucy tomato goodness...
LaRae
Amazing!!
Ben Rosen
Looks good . I always wanted to make my own sausage. I even got a sausage attachment for our mixer for our wedding. Just make me nervous to try it .
Alan Bergo
Thanks Ben. I've used so many different types of sausage attachments and stand alone machines over the years, some of them are easier to use than others. I'm here for advice when you're ready.
Chris LaVenture
You don't have the wine listed in the ingredients list. How much and is it dry white?
Alan Bergo
Thanks this is partly why there's also video and instructional images, just in case I miss something. Just a splash of dry white.
Dylan
You got it, Ben 🙂 it's not as hard as it seems and even an imperfect sausage is still a pretty dang good sausage.