breakfast skillet with sausage, peppers, eggs, and hashbrowns
This recipe is inspired by a breakfast dish at a local diner. Breakfast diners (aka “greasy spoons”) are as valuable to have in your neighborhood as a local dive bar, tavern or pub that serves food. I’ve noticed both have become more and more difficult to track down. We have a great breakfast diner, but like anything else these days, prices there have skyrocketed. It’s nearly $50 for us to go there, have two breakfasts, and two cups of coffee. And so naturally, we figured we could recreate this breakfast skillet with higher quality ingredients and at a much lower cost to us.
Like Shepherd’s Pie (the last post), this has become a quick weeknight meal option that’s satisfying and full of ingredients I usually have on hand. Breakfast for dinner is one of those tricks to pull out when you don’t have a meal plan or special ingredients available. This recipe uses homemade hashbrowns. For some reason, making hashbrowns from scratch scares people off. I’ll do my best to help you set those fears aside. Homemade hashbrowns are really easy to make and the taste a whole lot better than rehydrated hashbrowns (although these definitely have their place) or even the “fresh” hashbrowns you’ll find near the eggs in the grocery store.
Breakfast Skillet with Sausage, Peppers, Eggs, and Hashbrowns
A classic breakfast diner dish - a breakfast skillet with sauteed onions, peppers, ground sausage, and eggs served over homemade hashbrowns.
Ingredients
HASHBROWNS
- 2 large russet potatoes, unpeeled and washed
- olive oil
- salt and pepper
SKILLET
- 5 large eggs
- 1 red pepper, diced
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 LB ground sausage (like Jimmy Dean)
- shredded cheese for garnish
- salt and pepper
Instructions
First, cook the ground sausage breaking it up in a hot pan. Once the sausage is cooked all the way through, I like to keep cooking it over lower heat, rendering down the fat, and resulting in crispy pieces of crumbled sausage. Set aside
Next, sauté the bell pepper and onion together in a pan with olive oil and seasoning until soft. Set aside.
For the hashbrowns, you can shred the potatoes using either a box grater (coarsest shred) or the grating attachment on a food processor. We do both and both work great. If you're doubling the recipe, I'd definitely use the food processor - it's incredibly fast, just requires a little extra clean up. Once the potatoes are shredded, it's important that you squeeze out the excess water. You can do this by placing a tennis ball sized amount of potatoes in your hand and squeezing in batches. Once you've removed the excess water, add shredded potatoes to a hot (medium high heat) cast iron pan. Spread them out evenly and don't smash them down. Next add 2-4 TBSP olive oil to the pan over the top of the potatoes. This will seep down to the bottom of the pan. Season generously with salt. Treat the potatoes like you would a piece of meat that you're trying to obtain a sear on - let it them cook for 3-4 minutes before flipping. You'll have to flip them many times to ensure that you get the level of crispness that you want, just be sure not to press them down or stir them. Too much handling can result in a gummy hashbrown.
Beat the eggs, and once the hashbrowns are done cooking, scramble the eggs. Just before they're done, add the sausage and pepper/onion mixture and fold these into the scrambled eggs.
Plate with hashbrowns on bottom, egg mixture on top, and then garnish with a bit of shredded cheese.
Notes
Inspired by: our local breakfast diner