These chicken breakfast sausage patties, made with ground chicken and a blend of spicy, sweet, and savory spices, are perfect for quick weekday breakfasts, or to stash in the freezer for holiday entertaining.
Chicken Breakfast Sausage
Ingredients
Directions
In a large bowl, combine the sage, marjoram, thyme, garlic, spice rub, salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes, allspice, and maple syrup.
Add the chicken and stir gently or use your hands to thoroughly mix in the seasoning. Don’t overmix as this can make the sausage tough.
Divide the mixture into 8 equal portions. Roll each portion into a ball and gently press between your hands to form a patty 1/2-inch (12-mm) thick and 2 1/2 to 3 inches (6 to 7 1/2 cm) wide.
Place on a rimmed baking sheet and refrigerate, uncovered, for at least 45 minutes or up to overnight. (You can freeze the sausage patties, well wrapped, up to 1 month, then cook without thawing.)
In a nonstick skillet over medium heat, warm 1 teaspoon oil. When hot, add the patties, taking care to not overcrowd the skillet. You may need to cook the sausage in batches.
Cook one side until browned and then flip and cook on the other side until the patties are cooked through, 3 to 5 minutes per side. Repeat with additional batches, adding an additional teaspoon of oil per batch.
Recipe Testers' Reviews
I thought the flavor of this chicken breakfast sausage was a good jumping off point. To me, this doesn't truly taste like Jones or Jimmy Dean (in my book, the most iconic breakfast sausage flavors), but it's tasty in its own right.
Next time I would most definitely start with 1 teaspoon of kosher salt and go from there. I love red pepper flakes, but for a breakfast sausage this was too much. I would halve the amount next time.
A surefire way to toughen up the chicken is to mix it with a wooden spoon. Forget the spoon and put put on some prep gloves and gently mix it with your hands so you can FEEL what you're doing, much the way you would with making a pie crust by hand.
Next time, I would also allow the patties to sit for much longer in the fridge (I only did 45 minutes) to see if the flavors would mellow and coalesce a bit more. I will use this recipe as a foundation to build on since this is the kind of thing that works well for my family and is much less expensive than premade chicken breakfast sausage at our local Wegmans! (Now thinking that chopped apples might also be a good addition!)
I used A.A. Borsari Coffee Rub & Seasoning (sea salt, coffee, sugar, garlic powder, paprika, coriander, chili pepper, cocoa, garlic, basil, rosemary, black pepper, nutmeg).
I reheated a patty about 2 hours later (after being refrigerated) in my 1800-watt microwave on high for 18 seconds and it was fine. Not dried out at all.
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Barb P.
I'm a fan of breakfast sausage, usually in the form of pork or turkey. This was the first time I tried a chicken breakfast sausage and I was glad to add it to my repertoire. The ingredients are nicely balanced so no one flavor overwhelms the others. A little sweet, a little hot, and all good.
I used a store-bought smokehouse rub. It's tomato based with sugar added as well as garlic, onion, and other spices. It contains salt so I reduced the salt in the recipe to 1 teaspoon, which was fine with me but salt addicts may need to add more.
Not counting the time of digging through the cabinets looking for stray spices, the total hands on time was only about 5 minutes.
A couple patties were leftover and refrigerated overnight and then microwaved on low power the next morning. The microwaving warmed them without toughening them.