When someone offers to bring a casserole to a party, I’ll admit to conjuring weary images of canned soup and mushy vegetables. Yet because that sort of dish is a perfectly sensible solution when feeding a crowd, instead I invite casserole’s Italian cousin, the strata.
A close relative to bread pudding but always savory and never sweet, the layered strata is a winning option for potlucks and holiday gatherings, and it is an easy meal for your own brood, too. Brunch is often where you’ll find stratas, and I also like to serve them for brinner — that happy marriage between breakfast and dinner, so well suited to cold, way-too-busy winter nights.
I offer the accompanying recipe for a crowd, but this squash-and-kale-filled strata studded with sausage can be scaled down easily. Its ingredients may be shuffled around depending on what’s in the refrigerator. The beauty of a strata is that the key ingredients are likely to be on hand; I almost always have a few eggs, some bread, some sort of dairy and a hunk of cheese. I use this recipe as a guide, not a hard-and-fast set of rules. If I have fewer eggs, I will add a little more milk. Less milk, more eggs. Meat or no meat. A combination of vegetables or a singular flavor. Strata is easygoing.
The bread is a key player. My preference is for an enriched bread such as brioche, challah or even torn croissants, but I have even made this dish with leftover Parker House rolls, split in half. Some people like to dry out the bread on a baking sheet for a day or two, as you might for Thanksgiving stuffing, but that takes planning. Instead, I am more likely to make strata when the bread on the counter has gone a little stale all by itself. Plenty of strata recipes call for leftover baguette or sourdough bread, and while there is no reason not to use those options, I make sure to slice craggy crusted breads as thin as possible — otherwise the crust can remain firm and unyielding, even after it is soaked in the custard.