Breakfast sausage patties… Do I have your attention?

So what I’d like to introduce is our breakfast sausage patties. These are made with our pasture raised, certified organic turkey and it’s a mix of spices that I’ve developed myself. I think you’re gonna like them.

Here’s what the package of sausage should look like when you receive it. It’s frozen still. It’s got four patties, two on the top, two on the bottom. They’re separated by a layer of wax paper to make them easy to peel apart. And you can see this package weighs 1.11 pounds. Most of them will weigh just a tiny bit more than one pound, making the patties approximately quarter pound patties.

So this sausage recipe is my own creation. I started off with a pork breakfast sage-based patty that I like to make for our family. And I wanted to adapt it to turkey. Now you know, turkey and pork, they don’t quite interchange evenly. Pork has a lot more fat and so it’s a little more forgiving when cooking it. So I was looking around for an ingredient to put in there that would keep the turkey from becoming excessively dense as it’s cooked. And I played around with all sorts of recipes. You should see the number of recipes I’ve come up with over the last two months as I’ve been developing this one. We’ve eaten a lot of sausage — and that’s a good thing. But it took a long time to get to where we are right now. So what we found is that apples work very well to prevent the turkey mix from becoming overly dense. They also add a slight bit of background sweetness. Now apples, they do hide in the background, so we need to add quite a few of them. It’s surprising the pile of apples we have by the time we’re done that goes into this blend. The next thing we wanted of course was sage. Now I always find that my favorite breakfast sausages are sage based. I like a hearty breakfast, something like eggs and coffee. Something like that needs a fairly muscular flavor profile to be able to stand up to it. So sage is one of those ingredients. It’s got that beautiful scent, that kind of woodsy smell, and for me that’s always a great accompaniment to any good breakfast. You could also of course cook it up alongside pancakes and syrup, or you know, I’m not telling you how to eat your breakfast. And of course as with most sausages, you’ll want to add some salt and pepper. This recipe gets us to a basic sage breakfast sausage, but it didn’t quite do the job for me. I found I needed to add a little bit extra to just get a few of these ingredients, especially the sage and the pepper, to stand up on their toes a little more. And the winning combination turned out to be garlic and ginger.

Now this is what I had and it was almost what I wanted. I was thinking back to a really good sage sausage I had once and it came to me: vinegar. I need a little bit of vinegar. So we’ve got some apple cider vinegar with the mother (real apple cider vinegar has a mom).

Now when cooking this sausage I use a greased cast iron skillet. I like to add some pork lard or you could use beef suet or chicken fat. I prefer good, high quality saturated fats. If you’re into oils you can use whatever oil you typically use for greasing your pan. If you have a non-stick [gets tongue tied] skillet I’m pretty sure that would work. I don’t have one to test this out on so give it a try and let me know. So I heat the pan up to a medium temperature. And I’m just lightly pan frying it for a few minutes on each side. I put a cover on it to keep any splats inside the pan. It usually only takes maybe, approximately, three minutes on the first side maybe two minutes on the second. Now with poultry the general food safety recommendation is to cook it up to 165 degrees. Now that’s something you can do for food safety to go up to 165. But you can achieve the same levels of control by cooking up to 150 degrees and then holding that temperature for three minutes. So you could race it right up to 160, and then try to bring the temperature down quickly. Or you could bring it up to 150 and hold it for three minutes. I prefer to bring it up to 150 and hold it for those three minutes. So what I do is I use my instant read thermometer and I’m just probing the patty. As the temperature goes up 148, 149, when it gets to 150 I turn the burner off, move the pan over to a cool burner, and let the temperature just hold over that 150 degree range. I find that if I go up into the high 160s the patties can become over-dry. It’s hard to control the level of dryness once you get into very high temperatures for poultry. This is true for just about any poultry.

It’s good to note that all of these ingredients are certified organic. So we’ve got our ground turkey. We’ve got apples, sage, salt, pepper, ginger, garlic, apple cider vinegar.

Well that wraps up our overview of our certified organic, pasture raised turkey breakfast sausage patties from Wrong Direction Farm. I hope you enjoy them! Thank you.