Breakfast Best Fully Cooked Pork Sausage Patties

In my admittedly subjective view, the ideal breakfast contains the sacred trifecta of egg, starch, and meat. Maybe it’s biscuits and gravy alongside scrambled eggs. Perhaps it’s an omelet with breakfast potatoes and sausage links. Or it could even be a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on a biscuit with a hashbrown on the side for good measure.

The meat part of the trio is a whole conversation in and of itself. Pork seems to be the most popular breakfast meat. Bacon is naturally the favorite, and ham is the dark horse. Somewhere in between lies sausage, the meat that can sit on the side or inside something.

Aldi sells a few kinds of sausage, from rolls to links, from uncooked to precooked. Among the options are a precooked sausage patty, an option that is both fast — because it’s just a matter of heat and eat — and versatile — because it can sit on a sandwich or be served as a side.

Here are our thoughts on those precooked sausage patties.

Breakfast Best Fully Cooked Pork Sausage Patties are an Aldi Regular Buy. They’re available in stores all the time, and they have been a staple in the grocer’s refrigerated section for years.

They come in a plastic bag with a Ziploc-style resealable top. Each bag contains 18 patties and costs $8.79, or about 49 cents a patty. The patties are part of a mixed case that includes both an original flavor and a maple-flavored version. They are stocked in the store’s frozen section and should be kept frozen until ready to prepare.

Both versions have identical cooking instructions and can be prepared over the skillet or in the microwave. To cook on the skillet, preheat the skillet to medium low. The instructions say to brown the first side to desired appearance, then flip and brown the other side.

To cook in the microwave, place a paper towel on a microwave-safe plate, then place the sausage(s) on the towel and cover with another paper towel. Heat on high, cooking for 60 seconds if you’re heating one patty and 90 seconds if you’re heating two. The instructions note that heating times may vary by appliance, and that you should turn patties and rotate once during heating.

I usually cook these on the skillet, and I tend to rotate them a few times in order to avoid burning them on one side. Keep in mind, again, that these are precooked, so you’re heating them to a desired temperature, not cooking them from raw.

From a taste perspective, we mostly like both patties. The original flavor tastes about like you’d expect, with that savory flavor of traditional sausage patties. The maple flavored version has a sweet accent to it. Both of them occasionally have some gristle to them, but for the most part the texture is good.

On the downside, they’re both processed and have a lot of the things your doctor might tell you to stay away from. Both have pork and mechanically separated turkey as their primary ingredients. The original’s ingredients also include corn syrup solids and dextrose, and they are high in fat (18 grams) and saturated fat (6 grams). They also have some sodium (300 milligrams) and 190 calories per patty.

The maple-flavored version has similar ingredients plus a few extras like sugar and maltodextrin. The nutrition information reads similarly, if not identical, with high amounts of fat (17 grams), saturated fat (6 grams), some sodium (260 milligrams), and 190 calories. The maple-flavored versions also have 3 grams of sugar.

Our testers have generally liked these. They feel like the original patty tastes much like traditional sausage patties we’ve had elsewhere, while the maple-flavored one tastes like what a patty would taste like if you dipped it in a little pancake syrup. In years past, some of our testers preferred the maple flavored, although of late they lean toward original. Your own tastes may vary.

The Verdict:

As far as heat-and-eat meats go, these precooked sausages are a quick and easy option. Simply toss them on the skillet or in the microwave, and they’re ready to go in no more than a few minutes. They are processed, though, with some additives to give them their texture and flavor, and they do have a lot of fat, especially saturated fat. We’ll leave it up to shoppers to decide if the tradeoffs are worth it. Still, these remain a popular Aldi option, as they’ve been stocked in the freezer aisle as long as we’ve written about Aldi, and we expect them to be around for the foreseeable future.