Homemade Apple Cinnamon Breakfast Sausage Links

What makes a great breakfast even better? Sweet and savory Apple Cinnamon Breakfast Sausage.  This juicy pork links with a hint of apple and the cinnamon sweet are a great addition to your eggs, pancakes, or whatever you are having! 

This homemade breakfast sausage recipe is easy to make and can also be made into patties if you don't have a stuffer or casings on hand. Follow along with our video tutorial below or grab our recipe and best practices below. 

The Meat 

For a lot of pork sausages, pork butt is a really great cut to use. The meat to fat content ratio really lends itself well to the flavor profile and texture that we look for in a well-rounded sausage. For this, we went with a bone in pork butt. This cut is pretty popular and more readily available than bone-out. The only trick is getting that bone out of there without losing too much meat. 

Use and paring or boning knife to work your way around the bone. Take your time, mostly to avoid any accidents, but also to make sure you are not wasting any meat and not leaving any extras on the bone. Cut the meat into 3” cubes for grinding.  

The Grind 

Keep it cold! I put all the grinder parts I could in the freezer overnight. The tubing, auger, dies and blades were as cold as I could get them for grinding. In top of that, after I cut the pork into grinder sized pieces, I placed it all in the freezer for 20 minutes so that the fat would firm up a little more.  

Cold meat is the ideal for making sausage, so we want to do everything we can to keep it that way. Cold product will help to keep the protein and fat separate during the grinding process. When the fat and protein are separate, the texture of the sausage is much better. It will end up with a better bite. If the meat was warm for the grind, you would end up with a mushy texture, which wouldn’t be very appealing.  

On top of that, cold meat will slow the growth of bacteria. Whenever working with raw meat of any kind, we need to be mindful of food safety. Keep it cold.  

With breakfast sausage, we’re looking for a pretty fine grind. We did the first grind with a 3/8” grind, and then switched to a 3/16 grinding plate to finish. After one pass through 3/16” we noticed the meat to be still too coarse, so we passed it through one more time. This totaled 3 grinds, which is common for breakfast sausage.  

Seasoning 

Trying to do something a little different, we decided to use our Apple Pie Rub. On top of that we peeled and ground some fresh apple right into the sausage. We still wanted to have some of the classic breakfast sausage flavors in there to give a well-rounded breakfast taste. So we also used our No. 117 Classic Breakfast Sausage seasoning to balance out the sweetness and give the classic sage flavor, along with bumping up the salt content. When we ground the apples into the meat, we found that there was enough juice being introduced that we ended up not needing to add any more liquid, which was a bonus!

Don’t forget to make a small patty of meat a fry it up for tasting before you stuff your sausage. Adjust your seasoning to your liking. More salt? More Apple Pie Rub? Once the sausage is stuffed, it’s done.  

Casing 

PS Seasoning is a one stop shop when it comes to sausage making. We have so many different sausage seasonings and flavors to choose from, and we also have the smokers and casings. We used a natural sheep casing for our breakfast sausage. Our Home Pack Sheep Casing is a 20-22mm size casing for up to 25 lbs of meat. Sheep casing is very common for breakfast sausage. They come out a little bigger, but the texture and the snap are perfect.  

Link em’ up and enjoy. We were really happy with the way these turned out. As for a breakfast sausage, the classic flavor with added sweetness is absolutely delicious. The little pieces of apple ground right into the sausage ad a little different texture. Overall a great addition to the breakfast plate.