With my special blend of seasonings mixed with ground pork, you’ll make the tastiest copycat Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage.
You can shape the ground sausage into patties, perfect for breakfast sandwiches. Or you can crumble it up and add it to breakfast burritos or egg bites. Either way, it’s absolutely delicious.
My husband recently shot an elk during hunting season and we decided to butcher the elk ourselves. In the process we made over 30 pounds of ground elk that I turned into breakfast sausage. I made several batches, tweaking and testing all the different spices and combinations… I believe I have nailed the PERFECT blend of seasonings for breakfast sausage.
Breakfast Sausage Seasoning
The best part? – this seasoning blend works for all types of meat. I’ve used it in ground elk, ground pork, ground chicken and even ground turkey. Every time it’s a home run.
Ingredients Needed for Breakfast Sausage
Here’s what you’ll need in order to make this breakfast sausage at home. As always, you can find the full list of ingredients located in the printable recipe card below.
- Salt – use a Kosher salt for this recipe
- Black Pepper – adds a nice touch of savoury spice
- Crushed Red Pepper – use more or less for your desired spice preference
- Sage – use a ground sage for the best flavor
- Thyme – adds that perfect amount of herb flavor
- Nutmeg – the warm spice is surprisingly delicious in the breakfast sausage
- Ground Ginger – gives the sausage that perfect zing
- MSG – this is optional, but definitely adds a nice umami flavor to the sausage
- Cold Water – cold water helps to bind all the seasonings in the meat
How To Make Breakfast Sausage
Once you have all your spices out and ready to go, it’s really quite simple to mix up your sausage.
Combine the seasonings with the ground pork (or ground meat of your choice), and use clean hands to incorporate the mixture.
Why Make Homemade Sausage?
There are a lot of great reasons to skip the store bought ground sausage and make your own instead.
Control Over Added Ingredients
One main reason is that you have complete control on the ingredients going into the sausage. If you’re trying to control your salt intake, this is a great way to do it.
My breakfast sausage seasoning contains NO sugar! I found that sugar caused the sausage to burn too easily and didn’t really add much to the overall flavor.
Different Types of Meat
Looking to cut down on calories or wanting to bulk up on protein? Making your own sausage out of ground turkey or chicken is a great way to do just that.
- 1 pound of ground turkey – 120 grams of protein (920 calories)
- 1 pound of ground chicken – 110 grams of protein (860 calories)
- 1 pound of ground pork – 110 grams of protein (1300 calories)
- 1 pound of ground elk – 94 grams of protein (880 calories)
For us, we butchered our own elk and had loads of ground meat that we turned into a mixture of breakfast sausage, Italian Sausage (I’ll share that recipe soon), as well as hamburger. *I used my KitchenAid grinder attachment and added beef fat from our local butcher, since elk is a very lean meat.
Breakfast Sausage Patties
You can shape the sausage into patties and brown on a griddle or stove top.
Freeze them in layers (like shown above) for about 1 hour, then you can pop them in a zip lock bag and store them in the freezer for up to 3 months. Pull out individual patties when needed to make a quick breakfast sandwich!
Can you make sausage links?
The short answer is yes. However, in order to make sausage links out of this sausage recipe you would need sausage casings and a machine or device like a sausage caulking gun in order to stuff the casings.
You can definitely use this recipe to stuff sausage casings – then you can cook them using my Air Fryer Sausage Recipe.
How To Store Breakfast Sausage
Once you’ve mixed up the breakfast sausage, you can store the raw meat in the fridge for up to 2 days. The seasonings should bloom nicely in the meat over that time.
After the sausage has been cooked, you can store it in an airtight container in the fridge for 3 to 5 days. Or you can freeze it for up to 3 months.
I’m positive you’re really going to enjoy this homemade Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sausage recipe as much as we do. I can’t wait to hear what you think!
Jimmy Dean Breakfast Sausage Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 lb. ground pork, *see notes
- 2 tsp kosher salt
- ¾ tsp black pepper
- ¾ tsp ground sage
- ¾ tsp red pepper flakes, more or less depending on spice level
- ½ tsp Thyme, dried
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
- ¼ tsp ground ginger
- ⅛ tsp MSG, optional
- 2 tbsp COLD water
Instructions
- Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix with clean hands to incorporate the seasonings into the ground pork.
- Once combined, you can shape the meat into 8 (2 oz.) patties and cook on a griddle over medium-high heat until browned on both sides and internal temperature reaches 160 degrees F. Or you can brown the meat in a skillet and crumble until no longer pink.
