You can make your own breakfast sausage in just a few minutes and get just the flavor you want. In our version, we leave out the common onion, garlic and hot peppers, which are great in dinner sausages but overpower eggs or pancakes. Instead we add a bit of apple to the sausage, which adds moistness and an interesting accompanying flavor.
We mix the spaced together in a mortar and pestle that we liberated from our chem lab decades ago, but you can easily buy them online. Lacking one, you can chop the spices together with a knife on a cutting board, or use a blender.
- 1 Tb dried sage
- 1 Tb dried thyme
- 1 tsp fennel seed
- 1 tsp brown sugar
- 1 ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
- 1 lb ground pork
- 1 tart apple, peeled and cored
- Mix the dry ingredients together in a mortar and crush them with the pestle, until the spice blend is uniform.
- Using your hands and/or a wooden spoon mix the spices into the ground pork in a medium bowl.
- Mince the apple pieces by hand or using a food processor and mix the apple into the pork mixture. You may not need all of it.
- Use a ¼ cup measure to scoop out the amount of meat for each sausage.
- Cook the sausages on a 375˚ F griddle for 4 minutes per side. Press them down so they are flat. You might want to set a timer to keep from over cooking them and drying them out. The sausages are done when the internal temperature is around 145˚ F.
- Keep the sausages warm while you prepare the pancakes or eggs to go with them.
This doesn’t take much longer than cooking frozen sausages, and the flavor is really terrific! Form all the remaining sausages into patties and freeze them in layers, separated by wax paper in a plastic freezer container. Makes about 1 dozen good-sized sausages.