Sausage and Cheese Baked Orzo with roasted broccoli
Rice-shaped orzo pasta bakes in a flavorful sauce for this dish that is super creamy and topped with melted cheese. Thanks to feedback from our members, we made this one-pan meal, featured in January 2018, even simpler.
Ingredients
- Broccoli - 12 oz, florets
- Garlic - 2 cloves, chopped
- Oil, cooking - 1 Tbsp
- Lemon juice - 2 tsp
- Garlic - 2 cloves, chopped
- Oil, cooking - 1 Tbsp
- Sausage, Italian raw - 8 oz
- Tomato paste - 3 Tbsp
- Italian seasoning - 2 tsp
- Pasta, uncooked orzo - 1 1/2 cups
- Tomatoes, diced and preferably fire-roasted (14 oz / 397 g) - 1 can
- Stock, any type - 1 cup
- Cheese, shredded Swiss - 4 oz
Nutrition Facts
Prep
- Broccoli / Garlic (for pasta and broccoli) - (If prepping right before cooking, get oven heating first.) Prep as directed. Store separately. (Can be done up to 5 days ahead)
Make
- Heat oven to 400F / 204C degrees.
- Toss broccoli and garlic with oil (portions for broccoli) and season with some salt and pepper. Spread out on a sheet pan.
- Roast broccoli until tender and starting to brown in spots, shaking the pan halfway through cooking, ~25 minutes.
- While broccoli roasts, heat a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add oil (portion for pasta) and sausage. Cook sausage, breaking it apart with a spoon, until starting to brown, 5 to 7 minutes. Drain off any excess oil.
- Stir in tomato paste, garlic (portion for pasta), and Italian seasoning. Saute for 1 minute.
- Add pasta, tomatoes (including liquid), and stock, scraping up any brown bits on the bottom of the pan. Bring to a simmer.
- Top pasta with cheese and cover with a lid. Transfer to oven. Bake, covered, until pasta is tender, 13 to 16 minutes.
- When broccoli is finished, squeeze lemon juice over top.
- Serve pasta with broccoli on the side. (If you have some parsley leftover from earlier in the week, you can sprinkle some on top of the pasta.) Enjoy!
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Reviews
This meal has 64 reviews
Very solid meal. Nothing extraordinary, but it'd be hard not to like it.
Very good! I only took off a star because it took more broth and more time for the orzo to cook. Maybe next time will cook orzo separately first (kinda defeats the purpose of easy one pot meal though).
We thought this was delicious! We used chicken sausage, diced tomatoes with italian seasoning in them (in addition to the 2 tsp of italian seasoning), and topped with mozzarella and parmesan. No problem with orzo sticking and it was cooked after 13 minutes.
I added an extra 1/2 cup broth, a little frozen spinach, and upped the tomato paste and added salt. Excellent, and very fast!
Yummy and easy, but subtracting a star because (like others mentioned) the orzo just didn't cook through in the predicted time, and it didn't cook very well, either. The orzo on the sides of the Dutch oven just got hard and burnt to the point that they were inedible. Not sure if this was because of the type of pasta or that the recipe should have called for more broth... Also, there should have been more broccoli (which was delicious)! I'd use at least 16 oz for 4 servings.
This was pretty good! For some reason, the orzo at the bottom of the pan got a little crunchy...I might lower the temperature next time