Breakfast Sausage Patties and Eggs

Four thick Berkshire breakfast sausage patties, plus a dozen pasture-raised chicken eggs. Fifteen dollars, local pickup, from Bryant Creek Heights in Conway, Pennsylvania. This is the breakfast box for households that would rather have loose sausage than ham on a Saturday morning.

The sausage is made from our own Berkshire and Blue Butt hog trim, ground and seasoned at a USDA-inspected facility. Real breakfast sausage seasoning: sage, black pepper, a touch of brown sugar, salt, nothing exotic. Patties are portioned generous enough to be a main, not a garnish. Vacuum-sealed and frozen.

Berkshire and Blue Butt hogs finish with more intramuscular fat than commercial breeds, which matters more in sausage than it does anywhere else in the pig. That fat is what gives real breakfast sausage its texture and its snap: the patty holds together, browns properly on the outside, and stays juicy inside instead of turning into a dry disc. Commercial breakfast sausage is typically bulked up with water and phosphates to compensate for lean commercial pork. Ours does not need to be.

Cook them from thawed if you can. Cast iron on medium-low, no oil needed (the patty renders its own fat), four to five minutes a side until browned and the internal reads one sixty. If you are cooking from frozen, drop the heat to low and give them longer. The fat needs to render slowly for the texture to be right.

The eggs are our standard hand-collected dozen from the Rhode Island Reds and the Easter Eggers, unwashed, uncoated, deep orange yolks. Fry them in the fat rendered from the sausage patties. That is the entire point of cooking breakfast in a heavy pan on a slow morning.

This box is the counterpart to the ham steak and eggs box for households that prefer loose sausage. If you want to try both, the bundles include ground and sausage together with a lot more variety. Local pickup only at the farm at 1701 Sampson Street, Conway PA 15027, coordinated by text to 412-491-9503 after your order comes in.