How to Cook Breakfast Sausage

Sausage is seasoned, which means there is sugar and spice on the surface, and both burn well before the inside is cooked. That single fact is the whole method.

Start in a cold pan

Put the patties in a dry cold pan and then turn the heat to medium. The fat renders out gradually as the pan comes up, and they end up frying in their own fat rather than sitting in a hot dry pan browning too fast.

Moderate heat, and turn once

Five or six minutes a side on medium. You are looking for an even brown crust and a patty that has firmed up. High heat gives you a dark outside and a raw middle, which is the complaint almost everyone has about breakfast sausage.

Never press them

Pressing a sausage patty squeezes out the rendered fat, which is both the flavor and the thing keeping it moist. There is no version of pressing that helps. The crust comes from contact and time, not pressure.

“Patience is a deficiency of mine. Patience is something that my dad models really well. And I think he got that from my grandmother who had it in spades.”

Gray Shipley

“You don't see pigs in the far, in the mountains very much. And that's because pigs are hard on slopes because they root, because they dig, they need to be on flat ground because they'll cause erosion.”

Gray Shipley

Pasture-raised pork is leaner

Which matters here. Less fat means less margin, so moderate heat is more important with ours than with a supermarket patty carrying more fat to spare.

“Pasture raised is where the, it's where the animal belongs. They belong on the pasture. And so don't take them out of the environment where they need to be.”

Gray Shipley

The whole range is in the sausage guide, and these go into a hash well.