Flavorful Mild Italian Turkey Sausage Patties

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Cooking With Anadi

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Homemade Mild Italian Turkey Sausage Patties Recipe (or Chicken!)

If you’ve been around for some time you know I love my savory breakfasts. One of my favorite options is a classic Homemade Breakfast Sandwich on an English Muffin. This is my favorite way to prepare this quick sausage and replicating some amazing breakfast sandwiches I’ve had from fast food places. I just love the toasted English muffin, molten cheese, the egg, and of course the tasty sausage!

What I especially love about making my own breakfast sandwich is when I’m preparing the sausage. The smell of this homemade sausage cooking in the morning makes my home smell like a breakfast diner. Not to mention the tenderness and flavors of a freshly prepared breakfast sausage. A store-bought sausage is fine, but when you make the breakfast sandwich completely from scratch, it’s just so much more rewarding!

Plus, not to be a Debbie downer, but you know the store-bought sausages are of course heavily processed, unless you’re picking up the sausage from a local deli or butcher. In that case, I say go for it! Otherwise, maybe exercise some caution. Of course I want you to follow my recipe, but my mission with this platform is to encourage you to make your own things because you’ll realize how beneficial it is to cook things yourself! Yes, it will take a bit of work to make the sausage instead of picking it up from the store, but I believe you’ll find your own to be much more flavorful! You can also make a large batch in advance and use it for multiple dishes like breakfast sandwich, tacos or pasta. At the end of the day, you will be saving some time and lots of money.

Why Should You Make Homemade Turkey Italian Sausage Patties

I’ve already outlined some reasons above, but let’s go over why you should be following this recipe!

• Easy to make: It may seem like some work but it’s just mixing spices in with your minced turkey or chicken!
• Healthy: Everything is fresh and you know exactly how the sausage is being prepared.
• Flavorful: These sausages are loaded with flavor! I’m sure they’ll pack in more flavor than generic, packaged sausages!
• Customizable: You can’t adjust the seasoning in a pre-packaged sausage now can you?
• Freezable: The sausage can be frozen for up to 4 months. If you have made the sausage in bulk, I would recommend portioning out the sausage before freezing to save time. For breakfast sandwiches, portion to 2 oz patties, or 3 oz per person for dinner/lunch sized portions.

Tools Needed

• Large bowl
• Spatula

Ingredients for Homemade Turkey Italian Sausage Recipe

• Ground turkey or chicken
• Cayenne pepper (optional, for heat)
• Paprika
• Salt
• Pepper

How to Make Homemade Ground Turkey Italian Sausage Patties

Preparing the Sausage

In a large bowl, add your ground chicken or turkey.

Then, add the cayenne pepper (if using), paprika, salt and pepper.

Using a spatula, mix well until the spices are well combined with the meat.

You can use the sausage as is or form them into 1 1/2-ounce patties for breakfast sandwiches or add them to pastas, tacos and so much more (3 ounce portion per person)!

How to Cook Turkey Breakfast Sausage Patties

It’s so easy to cook these turkey breakfast sausage patties! They’re meant to be easy!

To cook your patty, heat a pan on medium heat. Add some olive oil or butter (or use bacon grease if cooking with bacon to make a breakfast sandwich!), and add the sausage patty onto your pan. Cook for 1 1/2-2 minutes on each side until lightly browned on each side.

That’s it! Simple right?

Recommended Recipes

• Homemade Breakfast Sandwich
• Baked Penne with Spicy Calabrian Pepper Sausage
• Orecchiette with Spicy Italian Turkey Sausage

You can substitute the Italian and Calabrian Pepper sausage with this mild turkey/chicken sausage from the above recipes for your tasting and experimenting purposes!

How to Cook Frozen Breakfast Sausage Patties

Ideally, you would defrost your meat for best results. But it happens to all of us - we forget to do it! If you’ve forgotten in this case, however, don’t worry! These are meant to be a convenient grab-and-go option! Because we’ve made the patties so thin, they’ll defrost pretty much instantly. If anything, perhaps cook them for an extra minute or two, but I really haven’t noticed any difference in cooking the frozen patties versus fresh! Nothing special to be done if you’ve forgotten to defrost your meat - just take it out of the freezer and cook it out!

A Four-Spice Sausage: What Is Not in the Mix

The whole seasoning list for 6 oz of lean ground turkey is 1/8 tsp of paprika, 1/8 tsp of cayenne (and even that is marked optional), 1/4 tsp of salt and 1/4 tsp of pepper. Read that again, because for something carrying the word Italian there is a lot missing. There is no fennel seed, which is the single spice that defines Italian sausage. There is no garlic, no sage, no thyme and no rosemary. In fact there are no herbs in it at all, and no maple syrup either, which is what usually sweetens an American breakfast patty.

That restraint is the point. What you are making is a clean, well-seasoned base that tastes of turkey rather than of a spice blend, and it bends in whatever direction the rest of your plate needs. Push it toward a classic Italian profile with about 1/4 teaspoon fennel seed lightly crushed and a finely grated clove of garlic. Push it toward a diner breakfast with dried sage and a teaspoon of maple syrup. Red pepper flakes are the listed swap for the cayenne if that is what is in the cupboard.

Notice too that everything is measured in fractions of a teaspoon rather than in tablespoons. Six ounces of meat is a small amount and it is genuinely easy to over-season, so resist scaling the spices up by eye. Kosher salt is worth using here over fine table salt, because the larger flakes are visible as you mix and you can see whether you have distributed them evenly.

Portioning, Texture and Keeping It

The yield is written in ounces rather than as a patty count, which is deliberate: 6 oz gives you either 2 dinner-sized portions or 4 smaller breakfast sausage portions, and you decide which. It also does not have to be patties at all. Broken up in the pan as crumbles it goes straight into omelets or breakfast burritos, which is arguably the more useful form of it.

However you shape it, mix it as little as possible. Combine the meat and seasonings with your hands or a spatula only until the spices are evenly through it. Working ground turkey hard tightens the protein and gives you a springy, bouncy texture instead of a tender one, and unlike pork there is not enough fat here to hide that mistake. If you have the choice at the counter, ground dark meat turkey stays noticeably juicier than breast-only.

Prep is 3 minutes, which makes this a realistic weekday staple rather than a project. The raw mix will sit in the fridge for a day or two, and formed patties freeze well with parchment between them. Once cooked, keep them in the refrigerator and eat within 4-5 days. Reheat in a dry pan rather than the microwave, which steams them soft and undoes the crust.

The Numbers, and Why It Is Naturally Gluten-Free

The nutrition information works out at 61 calories, 5 g protein and 4 g fat per ounce, with 117 mg sodium. That is a genuinely lean sausage, and the sodium in particular is a fraction of what a supermarket packet carries, because you are adding a measured 1/4 tsp of salt rather than buying a product preserved for shelf life.