I love breakfast sausage patties. But I hate MSG. And sodium nitrate. And high fructose corn syrup. And the myriad of other strange ingredients that make their way into store-bought breakfast sausage patties.
That’s why I set out to create a recipe for homemade breakfast sausage patties that would not only taste great and be made from nutrient-dense ingredients, but also that would be as convenient as store-bought breakfast sausage patties. Convenient? YES! I make several pounds at once, freeze individual breakfast sausage patties, store them, and then whip them out later to fry up with eggs for a convenient, protein-rich breakfast.
Homemade Breakfast Sausage Patties
The Players
- 2 tbsp of dried sage
- 1 tbsp + 1 tsp of salt
- 2 tsp ground black pepper
- 1 tsp dried marjoram
- 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
- 2 pinches ground cloves
- 1 tbsp molasses (optional)
- 4 lbs of ground, grass-fed beef or pastured pork (see resources)
The How-To
1. In a bowl, mix the first 6 ingredients (all the dry spices).
2. Place the ground meat in a large bowl. Add molasses and dry ingredients. Mix with hands until spices are evenly distributed. Then, make patties. (I get about 36 out of the 4 lbs of meat.)
3. Line a cookie sheet with foil or wax paper. Line up your individual patties on the paper so that they’re not touching. When the bottom layer is full, add an additional layer of wax paper or foil and keep adding patties. When all the patties are lying flat on the cookie sheet, put the cookie sheet in your freezer. When patties are fully frozen, remove from the cookie sheet and place in a large freezer bag to store for later use.
4. To cook, saute the frozen patties over medium heat for approximately 5 minutes per side. Enjoy!
How awesome is this? I love making freeze-ahead meals or menu items. It takes a LOT of the stress out of being a busy mom! And in this case, it makes a nourishing, wholesome breakfast just that much quicker to come by. I’ve used these homemade breakfast sausage patties served along side eggs, as the base for a down-home Southern gravy, and inside sourdough English muffins to make breakfast sandwiches.
My favorite collection of freeze-ahead recipes is in the book Don’t Panic! Dinner’s in the Freezer, one of my top-5 recommended cookbooks.
(photo by lollar)
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Homemade Breakfast Sausage Patties | Food Renegade http://ow.ly/2008a
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I gotta try these. RT @FoodRenegade Homemade breakfast sausage patties (freeze-ahead for busy cooks!) http://su.pr/1DYuGt #realfood #recipe
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Looks yummy! I’ll have to give it a try! We don’t eat pork, so I was recently thinking about looking for a sausage recipe so I could make beef or turkey sausage w/o the added nasty stuff. Would you use the same recipe for use in dinner recipes that call for sausage?
No, this is definitely a breakfast sausage. Too much sage & sweet spices to be suitable for dinner.
well..the sweet isn’t optional here LOL! one additional think i do for DS because he prefers sausage from the store (and i buy welshire).. is i added shredded potatoes…call them hashbrowns. also you can add avocado (w/ some lemon to prevent browning.) I bake or fry a TON at a time and re-heat over a wee bit of h20 on the stovetop.
Sounds yummy. 🙂
We also do our own frozen homemade sausage patties, with a slightly different recipe. Besides using them for breakfast, we even use them in our spaghetti sauce!
.-= Nate @ House of Annie´s last blog post …Recipe for Fried Pork with Evaporated Milk =-.
Oh this is fantastic! Im going to link to this from my blog. I remember my older brother seriously loving breakfast sausage when we were growing up and he’s going to love seeing this link. cheers
.-= ben´s last blog post …Fundamental Ignorance =-.
I too hate all the extra crap they put into sausages. I love sausage more than bacon! My fiance just got me an awesome spice rack which happens to have all those spices. I am going to try out your recipe, thank you!
Well, sausage is certainly more nutrient-dense. I love the flavor of bacon, and eat quite a bit of it. But it’s mostly just fat, hardly any protein at all. And I have a small enough appetite that I really struggle to eat enough protein in my day to not only keep myself fit but grow a healthy baby as well. So, breakfast sausage wins the day.
The good news is there are farms that don’t put all that extra crap into sausages.
We offer bulk ground pork (season it as you like) in one to ten pound packages, hot italian and sweet italian sausages as well as hot dogs. All of these are without corn syrup, MSG or anything else like that. Good wholesome food we feed our family. For sweetener in our hot dogs we use just a dab of Vermont maple syrup (of course since we’re in Vermont!). As it says on our label: NoWeirdStuff.org That makes it eminently clear.
The only problem with our pork, sausage and hot dogs is we can’t make enough to meet demand for our meat.
Look around and you may likely find a farm near you that offers the good stuff.
Cheers,
-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in Vermont
I do this as well so that we can’t find safe (corn-free) sausage in stores, but I add shredded veggies to mine. I have found that my kids don’t notice a finely shredded zucchini and onion or two added and I like getting those extra veggies into my carnivores. Also, I add fennel seeds and rosemary and shredded garlic to that approximate recipe for Italian sausage. I don’t have access to safe pork so I use ground beef and we can’t tell a difference. I do use what most people consider a high ratio of fat (75/25) for my grassfed ground beef, but we prefer it that way and it does make an excellent sausage. When I make Italian sausage, I usually don’t even make patties, but just brown it like ground beef since we will use it on pizzas and in tomato bases sauces anyway.
.-= kc´s last blog post …Pizza (Homemade and Corn-free) =-.
I also get my grass-fed beef with a high fat content. It really helps keep it flavorful, and all those fats are so good for you!
I love this recipe. I used it a gluten-free and MSG-free breakfast sausage bake ( here’s that recipe: http://blog.your-glutenfreerecipes.com/2010/01/sausage-breakfast-casserole.html). In the original recipe I used homemade Italian sausage, but I liked your breakfast sausage recipe better.
.-= JadeSylver´s last blog post …Chicken and Sun Dried Tomato Pizza =-.
Glad it came out yummy!
This is so great! I cannot stand buying the processed package stuff that is always full of yuck! We try to eat as healthy as we can in our home and include lots of whole grains and fruits and veggies! These would be great with some of our favorite Kamut Wheat pancakes and a strawberry smoothie!!! Mmmm. Thanks for sharing 🙂
I’ve been making my own sausages for years and it’s the best way to go hands down.
Fresh ingredients minus the fillers and chemicals make it a lot more healthy too.
Mike
.-= Mike´s last blog post …Vertical Sausage Stuffer updated Tue Sep 14 2010 6-45 pm CDT =-.
I also use this recipe and alter it a bit:) I use fennel plus venison I harvest myself. A high protien start to an energetic day!
In response to Walt D. I also harvest and butcher my own venison. It’s cleaner meat, and much better for you. My two boys love it,and help make the sausage(they are 5 and 9). We just put up 30 lbs of breakfast patties on Sunday. So for anyone wondering, yes this is a fine recipe that you can tweek to your taste and not worry !!!!!!!!!! 🙂
Oh this sounds amazing good! Can’t wait to give this a try! You should enter this in Nourishing Ways Fundraiser eBook…they’re putting together cookbooks using original, healthy, whole food recipes. Bloggers get some benefits:
“You’ll retain copyright of your recipe and each recipe you submit (and we use) will include a link back to your site and bio.
After the first week after the book is launched, we’ll also open up an affiliate program for those who contributed! This means that you’ll have the option to let your readers know about it and earn 25% for each book sold.”
I think this would be a great addition to their cookbook!
http://www.naturallivingmoms.com/nourishing-ways-fundraiser/
If the meat was previously frozen be sure you cook the meat before you freeze the sausage. Re-freezing raw meat is a no no in food safety.
However, already cooked breakfast sausages makes it so easy for breakfasts during the week!
I thought this recipe looked familiar – I have same one, but with amounts reduced to reflect 1 lb. of ground pork. This is indeed a good recipe! Oh, one small difference – instead of molasses, I use brown sugar, about 1 1/2 tsp./lb. of pork.
Like the article on Sedgwick, Maine. Thanks for passing that along. :0)
I just want to thank you for this recipe. I make it A LOT. One thing I’ve started doing is mix all the seasoning (not the molasses!) and store in a spice jar. Makes about 10 tsp of seasoning. Then I add 2.5 tsp for one pound of meat when I need it. We like to use sausage for sausage gravy, so it makes more sense to just add the seasoning to the ground beef as we brown it. Works perfectly.
Thanks You!!!
There is nothing like homemade sausage patties for breakfast. I love them with eggs (over medium) and homemade biscuits. This recipe is very similar to the one I use, except my family does not care for sage. Even so, this is a great recipe. Thanks.
Our family is a big fan of making homemade sausages too and we have a similar recipe that my 10 year old daughter perfected – Paulina’s Perfect Breakfast Sausage.
I noticed that you call for 4 teaspoons of salt for 4 pounds of meat. That might work out OK if you use kosher salt which is less dense than natural salts, but if you use a natural salt like celtic salt or redmond real salt or even plain old sea salt (but don’t be fooled if it’s fine white sea salt and it’s cheap, it’s processed and missing many of the other beneficial minerals that would be in a truly natural salt) I expect it would be rather salty!
My husband worked in restaurant for a long time and the rule of thumb he uses for meat is 1/2 tsp of salt per pound and it works great whether it’s for ground meat, steaks or even for roasts and stews.
I love salt and we have a collection of all sorts of natural salts, so I’m not coming from the low-sodium camp. Once you get your meat mixed up you can cook up a small patty to check the seasoning and adjust before you make your patties and freeze the batch.
Having homemade frozen sausage in the freezer is a great way to know that there is something healthy and easy for breakfast and keeps you from grabbing that box of processed food in your cupboard out of desperation.
I’m interested in how to prepare these with respect to marinating them or otherwise introducing lactic acid cultures.
thanks
Ann
Ann, I don’t think you’d need to marinate these. The salt and sweetener should act like a cure. Just let the formed meat patties chill for four or five hours before freezing them. The rule is 2 days per pound of the cut. Each patty is just 1/9 of a pound. The salt and chill will keep the bad bacteria at bay and give the good, wild lacto-bacillus cultures in the air the boost they need to mildly culture the meat.
I just wanted to say thank you for this recipe. I made it a couple of weeks ago and they are delicious! It’s been so nice having it on hand and pulling a few out as we need them. I hadn’t had sausage in sooooo long after changing our diet and eating clean. My husband has been loving them too!
I made these last night for dinner when our other plans fell through. I had a package of ground pork defrosted and thought it would be fun to try your recipe, so I pared down the spices to my smaller amount of pork. My very picky 5 year old liked it well enough to ask for seconds, and my husband loved the sausage, both served with eggs and then again with sauteed veggies over the top. My 7 year old wasn’t a fan of the cloves, but I thought they added a nice touch to the sausage, thank you for the recipe! I am hoping to get a larger amount of ground pork soon (grassfed gmo-free pork is hard to find, so we have to wait!) so that I can make up some of these to freeze like you suggest, yum!
Yum! Pinning! Thanks.
These were amazing! I couldnt find any pastured ground pork so i used grassfed beef.. they hit the spot! I added the molasses.Perfect combination of everything!! Thank you so much!
Just what I was looking for! Made these with ground chicken. Yummy! They’re going on our breakfast sandwiches that we freeze for a healthy breakfast while you’re running out the door. Thanks!
I make a similar sausage using ground lamb from our own lamb.
Hi, I just found this recipe and it sounds close to what I’m looking for. And it sounds as though it tastes wonderful also. Can I use regular ground beef for this? And I don’t have any molasses, so can I use brown sugar instead? Thanx a bunch.
Delicious! I have tried so many recipes that are not quite right. I’m on the specific carb diet and had to use 1 ground up dehydrated date for the molasses, but the substitute is prefect! Thank you!
How is that enough dry spices for 4 lbs of meat?
sounds great !!!!!!!
The salt is about right, but I would double the pepper and the sage. I skip the other stuff. I’ve made sausage this way with ground lamb from our own animals for years. You just adjust the seasonings to your particular preferences and we happen to like sage.
I have made my own several times, both with and without sugar, and there is something the sugar component does to the patties. The best I can figure is the caramelization from the sugar rounds the flavor out, mellowing some of the sharper flavor components.I don’t use a lot, but what a use does make a difference.
Matt makes his own with turkey, so lesss fat. Really good too
I add jalapeno to mine for the hubby.
Just used your recipe this morning and had to try it as soon as I got it all mixed. It was just great. I am sure it will get better as it sets for several hours to blend. Will try it again this evening as breakfast for dinner.
I may also try cooking some in our electric smoker.