Homemade Pork Sausage Breakfast Patties

A two-pack of pork shoulder butts is on sale at Costco this week for $8 off per package. We bought a couple to use for various recipes, putting one directly in the freezer for later use.

While we normally use ground turkey or ground chicken to make things like taco meat, I have used ground pork for making Italian meatballs, tamale filling, etc.

Yesterday I cut two pork shoulders totaling a bit over 13 lbs into chunks and ran them through our KitchenAid meat grinder attachment using the course grinding disc.  I then reviewed a plethora of homemade pork sausage breakfast patty recipes and determined the spice mixture I wanted to use for the taste testing of the first 1-lb batch.

I have included a screenshot of the base recipe I created, minus the 1/4 tsp of cayenne pepper.  Since the recipe already includes black pepper and crushed red pepper, Elena thought it was a bit too spicy for her palate. It wasn't overpoweringly hot, but I aim to please, so I left it out for future batches, lol. Individual tastes vary, so use whatever ingredients you like, but note that sage is a very common mean spice ingredient in breakfast sausage.

Once I added all of the spices and breadcrumbs to the coarsely ground pork and mixed it thoroughly by hand, I ran it through the meat grinder using the medium grinding disc. This helps thoroughly blend the ingredients and grinds the meat into smaller pieces.

One pound of the mixture made about seven patties.  I took balls of meat a little larger than a golf ball, placed them on square pieces of parchment paper, covered them with another piece of paper, and Elena and Ivan pressed down on them with a salad plate so they were flattened into patties.  I then quickly removed the top sheet and inverted it onto a hot griddle at low heat and cooked for about 4 minutes on the first side until browned (and the top-side edges looked cooked a bit).  Once the patties cooked for a minute or two on the first side, the parchment paper was easily peeled off the top of each patty without taking meat with it.

A quick flip and three minutes on the other side, and we had thin sausage patties for sampling.  While they can certainly be eaten alone with other breakfast items, I made them into thinner,  breakfast-sandwich-sized circles so they can easily be placed on toasted English muffins, pancakes, burger buns, etc., along with an egg and/or a slice of cheese.

Since we ran short on thyme (no pun intended), I decided not to mix and regrind any more breakfast sausage for now. I placed pre-measured portions of coarsely ground pork into labeled Ziploc bags, stacked them flat, and stuck them in the freezer.  These can be used for other recipes as needed.  After I replenish my spice supply items, I will mix up another several pounds of the breakfast sausage, press out the patties, stack them with the parchment paper in Ziploc bags, freeze them, and pull as many out as we need when we want to have some for breakfast.