Breakfast sausage is a classic complement to a stack of pancakes and a nice, tall glass of orange juice. For people who try to avoid pork, this side dish often goes missing — unless, of course, a suitable substitute can be found. With the 365 Everyday Value Savory Chicken Breakfast Sausage, Whole Foods offers up a breakfast sausage that substitutes pork with chicken. Obviously, vegetarians will still need to look elsewhere for their breakfast sausage fix, but porkk-avoiding carnivores should be just fine with these.
According to the box, one serving is three links, and there should be approximately 3.5 servings per box. According to our math, that means each box should include about 10.5 links. Ours contained exactly ten (no half links to be found), so the math seems to work out alright.
The links come in a single sealed package, so if you only eat three at a time, you can fold over the top of the bag to keep the remaining links inside, then cram that back into the box and toss it back into the freezer. It’s admittedly not the most elegant solution, but it works well enough.
These come with microwave instructions, so we thought we’d put those instructions to the test. You can also fry them in a skillet with some water, but we used the microwave because it’s faster. We can get a little hangry waiting for our breakfast to cook, so we need our sausage links as soon as possible!
These come out smelling amazing, but looking like the shriveled fingers of someone who spent the six previous hours washing dishes.
Now, don’t get us wrong here; these taste really good. But the texture is so far off that it’s difficult to enjoy the flavor at all. Chewing one of these feels like you’re chewing on a piece of rubber. They’re tough enough that our teeth had difficulty penetrating them; we felt like our teeth would just keep bouncing off harmlessly.
They also end up dry around the outside, with just a small piece in the center that’s moist and juicy. Everything about these just feels wrong.
And so, we decided to see how these would turn out in a skillet. We didn’t want to have to resort to using the longer cook method, but we decided it was necessary here. Those instructions have you warm a skillet and then fry them in a small amount of water.
“Aha!” we said to ourselves. “This will fix the texture and the dryness!”
Keep in mind that if you use this cooking method, the water will evaporate very quickly, and if you overcook these they could easily start to char. We like ours charred just a little bit around the edges, as you can see in our image below, but anything beyond that could become pretty ugly.
The skillet really did the trick. While these are still a bit rubbery, they’re not nearly as bad as the microwaved versions. They also end up nice and juicy, just as breakfast sausage should be.
So what did we learn from this experiment? Well, these don’t turn out very well in the microwave. Fried in a skillet, they’re much, much better. We’re not sure why the food wizards at Whole Foods decided to even include microwave instructions at all (they don’t include microwave instructions on 365 Everyday Value personal pizzas). Of course, either way, they do taste pretty good, and if you add a little bit of syrup, they taste even better.
As we mentioned earlier, a serving size of these is three. That seems appropriate if you’re eating these as a side to a bigger meal, like pancakes or french toast. They won’t make a meal on their own. So as a side, you’re consuming 110 calories per serving. And even if you eat a whole package in one sitting, that’s only about 330-350-ish calories. That’s really not all that bad.
365 Everyday Value Savory Chicken Breakfast Sausage tastes great but has texture problems. While you can mitigate some of these problems by avoiding the microwave, these will end up a bit rubbery no matter what you do. If you can get past the texture, though, these are delicious, and they pair well with a stack of fluffy pancakes.
To learn more about the ingredients and nutrition facts for these frozen sausage links, check out our package scan below.
