French Onion Sausage Bake

Ingredients

• 300ml beef stock
• 1kg brown onions, thinly sliced
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 3 sprigs fresh thyme
• 100ml red wine (optional)
• 1 tbsp caster sugar
• 50g unsalted butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 8 pork sausages (about 800g)
• ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 baguette, sliced into rounds
• 150g Gruyère, grated
• Buttered greens or peas, to serve

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C (fan 180°C). Melt the butter with the olive oil in a large ovenproof frying pan over medium-low heat, then tip in the sliced onions with a generous pinch of salt — the salt pulls moisture out and gets the caramelisation moving.
2. Cook the onions slowly for 20–25 minutes, stirring every few minutes. You're looking for deep mahogany, jammy, with sticky edges catching on the pan. Rush this and you've got soggy onions; give it the full time and you've got the soul of the dish.
3. Stir in the caster sugar and the crushed garlic. Cook for 30 seconds, just until fragrant — no more. Burnt garlic turns the whole pan bitter, and you've worked too hard on those onions to lose them now.
4. Deglaze with the red wine if using, scraping up the sticky brown bits from the base of the pan — that's pure flavour. Pour in the beef stock, Dijon, Worcestershire and thyme sprigs, and let it simmer for 5 minutes until slightly reduced and glossy. Taste now and adjust with salt and pepper — this is the gravy the whole bake leans on.
5. Meanwhile, season the sausages well on all sides. Get a separate frying pan hot, add a drop of oil, and brown the sausages in two batches — don't crowd them. All eight at once and the pan steams instead of sears, and you'll lose the savoury crust that makes this dish. Two minutes a side for colour is all you need; they'll finish in the oven.
6. Nestle the browned sausages into the onion gravy, spooning sauce around them so they sit half-submerged — that's how they stay juicy through the bake.
7. Tuck the baguette slices snugly between the sausages, pressing them down so the underside drinks up the sauce while the top stays exposed to crisp.
8. Scatter the Gruyère evenly over everything and slide the pan into the oven. Bake for 20–25 minutes, until the sausages are cooked through (no pink in the centre, juices run clear) and the cheese is bubbling and golden.
9. For a deeper crust, flash it under the grill for 1–2 minutes until the cheese blisters and goes sticky-brown in patches. Watch it — it goes from golden to scorched fast.
10. Taste the gravy at the edge of the pan one last time and adjust seasoning. Scatter the parsley generously over the top, finish with a crack of black pepper, and bring the pan straight to the table so everyone digs through the molten Gruyère into the sausages and jammy onions together.