Ground chicken and grated apple seasoned just right make a delicious and nourishing way to start the day! Unprocessed, clean breakfast patties make an easy and frugal breakfast. This easy chicken apple breakfast sausage is made from scratch and is gluten free, grain free, GAPS compliant, and allergy friendly.
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Protein at breakfast sets us up for a strong day! Whenever I stray from a high protein breakfast, I remember all too quickly why I started eating mainly protein and vegetables for breakfast. Lower energy, slower brain function, and getting hungry mid-morning prompt me to get right back on track.
It isn’t just me! “They” say breakfast is the most important meal of the day– for a bunch of reasons. These quick and easy chicken apple breakfast sausage patties are one way to meet start the day well and meet your protein protein goal.
However, mornings can be busy; conveniences really help. Certainly, packaged, store-bought sausages taste great and provide the protein we want, but the ingredients include preservatives, colors, sugar, and unrecognizable mysteries. Not ideal!
Cleaner breakfast sausage options taste great, but the price tag can be hefty. With a family with a hearty appetite, it adds up.
At first, I tried seasoning ground turkey and chicken. Although that tasted fine, the meat was so dry we found it off-putting. There had to be a better way!
Breakfast sausage needs to:
- be economical.
- come together quickly.
- not contain icky ingredients.
- have a good texture– not too dry.
- seem like breakfast, not dinner.
- taste good!
Enter the humble zucchini!
While the apple in this recipe helps, the zucchini really makes it juicy without changing the flavor. (You don’t have to tell anyone there is a zucchini in there!) Doubling the recipe hardly makes a difference in the time to prepare, so I usually double these quantities and we are set for a week.
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How to Make Chicken Apple Breakfast Sausage
Measure your seasonings.
Grate your apple and zucchini. (I like to peel them first.)
Mix it all up thoroughly.
Melt your fat and fry up the patties.
That’s it!
Easy Chicken Apple Breakfast Sausage Patties
Ingredients
- 3 lbs ground chicken
- 1 apple
- 1 zucchini
- 1 T good salt
- 1 T dried crushed rosemary
- 1 T fennel seeds
- 1 T onion powder
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp dried sage
- 1 tsp black pepper
- 1 tsp nutmeg
- preferred fat for frying coconut oil, butter, ghee, tallow, etc.
Instructions
- Peel and grate apple and zucchini.
- (You can toast the fennel seeds before adding to the meat to bring out a bit more flavor. See below.)
- In a large bowl, mix the ground chicken with apple, zucchini, and all seasonings.
- Heat fat in a skillet over medium heat until it begins to bubble. (The meat will be less prone to sticking if it is quite hot before you add it, making your cleanup faster.) Form meat into patties of desired size and add to pan, leaving a bit of space between them. You can cover the pan if you want to speed up the cooking process. After a few minutes, when the tops are no longer pink and the bottoms are browning nicely, flip the patties and allow a few more minutes to brown the second side and ensure the patties are cooked through.
- Remove to a plate. At this point, you could either:cook all the patties and refrigerate what you don’t use immediately for another day.form what you didn’t use into patties and freeze on a lined tray, then move to a freezer container.put what you didn’t use into containers to refrigerate or freeze.I do the last option, putting a container in the refrigerator to use over the next few days and freezing the other containers until we need them. One of us freshly prepares the needed patties each morning.
Make It Your Way!
- The apple and zucchini don’t really have to be peeled. Skipping the peeling would save time, though I prefer the look without peels. Certain people who (ahem!) object to “little green things” in their food may also eat more peaceably if you peel. Also, if you are doing GAPS, you might want to avoid peels. I scooped out the seeds of the zucchini at first and used two zucchinis to compensate (once we were far enough into GAPS intro to cook in fat in a skillet and use all the seasonings listed).
- Zucchini isn’t the only possibility for adding juiciness. Summer squash, onion, or even mushrooms work well.
- Use a clove or two of fresh garlic in place of the garlic powder.
- Adjust the amounts of any seasonings to suit your preferences.
- Leave out or add other seasonings as you like. Thyme, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, paprika, and probably a few others find their way into these with good results.
- Use turkey rather than chicken. It will taste… more like turkey.
- If you are not on GAPS and you want something more like the chicken apple sausages sold in stores, you could add some maple syrup. Delicious!
- If you are trying to increase your animal fats, you can also mix some melted ghee, tallow, etc. right into the mixture.
- Optionally, toasting the fennel seeds a bit before adding them to the mixture enhances the flavor. Heat your skillet, spread the fennel seeds out in it, and stir them gently for a couple of minutes until they are fragrant. Then add them to your mixture and set the fat in the skillet for cooking the sausage patties.
Let me know how you liked these easy chicken apple breakfast sausage patties. What alterations did you make?
Need an accompaniment to the patties? They are good with squash pancakes. https://happyrecipebox.com/easy-chicken-apple-breakfast-sausage-patties/
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