When I saw the recipe on her Instagram feed, I immediately thought it looked like a pair of roly-polies, but I also know that I love kielbasa and I trust Ina implicitly, so I ran to the store to grab the groceries and gave it a shot.
How to Make Ina’s Hasselback Kielbasa
As Ina notes in her Instagram caption, this recipe was inspired by a Sam Sifton recipe that was published in The New York Times. It was a no-recipe recipe, so Ina took Sam’s idea and fleshed it out a bit more.
You start by cutting up a bunch of veggies. Ina calls for onions cut into half rounds, fennel sliced into slim wedges, and bell peppers cut into strips. You toss the vegetables with olive oil, garlic, thyme, fennel seeds, and salt and pepper, then arrange everything in a very large roasting pan or divide them among two sheet pans. The vegetables go into a 425°F oven for 20 minutes and while they’re cooking you turn your attention to the kielbasa.
To Hasselback the kielbasa, you just slice the sausage crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick slices. You want the sausage to stay intact, so you slice only about two thirds of the way through the meat.
After 20 minutes, the veggies will be steamy and starting to soften. You pull the pan out of the oven and put the sausage on top. To add a little extra flavor to the kielbasa, Ina has you mix equal parts Dijon and honey together. You brush the top and sides of the sausage with the honey mustard, then stick the pan back into the oven. The sausage and veggies cook together for another 30 minutes, with you brushing the sausage with more honey mustard every 10 minutes.
My Honest Review of Ina’s Hasselback Kielbasa
Ina (or should I say Ina and Sam) does it again! As I suspected, Hasselbacking the sausage created lots of crispy, craggy edges, much like what happens when you spiralize a hot dog (my absolute favorite way to make them). Those slices also meant that the kielbasa juices rendered out, which made the vegetables that much more delicious.
On the veggie front, the onions and peppers were tasty, but the fennel stole the show. My husband, who doesn’t really care for fennel, was a big fan of the vegetable once it was high-heat roasted. After 50 minutes in the oven, it was tender and sweet and had picked up a good amount of color from the baking sheet. I made this dish for a weekday lunch, which was possible because there’s a lot of hands-off time in this recipe. As my husband dug in, he said, “I can’t believe how delicious this is.” Another low-effort, high-reward Ina dish ftw!