Air Fryer Breakfast Sausages

Air fryer breakfast sausages are the fast, easy, and convenient way to make this classic breakfast meat. Using the air fryer helps free up your griddle and cooks them up perfect without worrying you’re going to burn them.

If you love your air fryer as much as we do, then you’ll welcome the opportunity to fry up breakfast sausages when cooking for the family.

Sausage, like bacon, can burn quickly if you don’t watch it on the stove top, but in the air fryer, you probably won’t run into that problem.

Cooking breakfast sausage in the air fryer not only frees up a pan, it also takes the guess work out of perfectly cooking breakfast sausages.

And unlike your oven, they will get a bit of a crispy, slightly charred outside when you use your air fryer.

Ingredients and Kitchen Supplies

We’re not really sure who needs to read this section, given the self-explanitory nature of the post, but here it goes:

• Breakfast Sausage Links – Option 1: use your favorite breakfast sausage links in the air fryer. It really doesn’t matter what brand or flavor, so pick your favorite.
• Breakfast Sausage Patties – Option 2: use your favorite breakfast sausage patties in the air fryer. No need to worry about brand or flavor, it really doesn’t matter for purposes of cooking them in the air fryer.
• Cooking Spray – With air fryer breakfast sausages, you don’t really need cooking spray, but if you want to be doubly sure it won’t stick or increase the chances of getting a crispy outside, then you’ll want to use cooking spray.

For equipment, we’re going to break this down really slowly.

You’ll need an air fryer.

Beyond fancy features, like pre-heating, the main thing here is the size of your air fryer.

Bear with us here for a second, it might get confusing.

Smaller air fryers will only fit a limited number of sausages.

Bigger air fryers can fit higher numbers of sausages.

This means you may need to adjust how many sausages you cook per batch based on your air fryer’s size.

You might also appreciate tongs or a spatula, but really anything you can use to safely remove the cooked sausage from the basket of your air fryer works.

How to Make Air Fryer Breakfast Sausages

1. Pick out your breakfast sausage.

OK, we really can’t help you much here.

Lots of brands offer basic breakfast sausage with standard seasonings.

Others offer smokey flavors or maple syrup infused monstrosities to ensure you really don’t get any health benefits from their sausage links or patties.

Some may offer low sodium options. Don’t let this fool you. They are still just as terrible for you as their higher sodium counterparts.

And let’s face it, you are eating breakfast sausage for enjoyment, not health benefits, so go on and enjoy that fat and salt laiden breakfast meat!

2. Cook your sausage.

Links and patties share the same cooking temperature (370°F (185°C)) and about the same cooking range of about 8 to 11 minutes.

To be safe, you can certainly seperate the two types (if you are even using two types to begin with) or you can take a chance and cook them all together.

If your air fryer has a preheat function, set it to 370°F (185°C) and let it come up to temperature.

If your air fryer is like ours and you set a time and temperature for it to run, then set the run time to about 15 minutes and let it come up to temp in the first 3 to 4 minutes before adding the links or patties.

Once the air fryer is up to temp, place the patties, links, or both in the bottom of the basket, leaving a bit of room between each for the hot air to reach.

Put the basket back in and allow to cook for about 8 to 11 minutes. They are done when they start to turn golden brown or char slightly over most of their surface area.

If you want to be fully sure, jam a meat thermometer into the middle of a link or patty. It should hit an internal temp of at least 160°F (71°C).

At about the halfway mark or when that damn beeping goes off, quiet the beast and give the sausage a quick shake.

If you are really persickity, you can flip the patties, but if you feel lazy, a quick shake will generally suffice.

3. Rest and Serve.

After all that hard work, it’s time to rest for about a minute.

Not you, you dumbass, the sausage needs to rest. It’s tired.

You, on the otherhand, probably have to keep getting the rest of the breakfast together, but hey, at least the sausage is ready to go.

Resting offers two benefits:

1. You or your family is less likely to burn their mouth after letting them rest a minute or two.
2. The juices in the sausages start to settle during the rest time, which allows them to keep more of their flavor and such.

Once you are reasonably sure little Johnny won’t burn his mouth when he bites into the sausage, go ahead and serve it as part of a delicious breakfast or add to another recipe.

Serving Suggestions

Seriously? Are you actually reading this section to find out how to eat breakfast sausage?

Well, if you are and for some reason have never heard of breakfast sausage or looking for new ideas for how to serve air fryer breakfast sausage, we’ll reward you for your willingness to actual read this by offering these suggestions:

• Add air fryer breakfast sausages to an omlet
• Make a breakfast sandwich with eggs, cheese, and breakfast sausage (easier with patties but doable with links)
• Serve alongside eggs, toast, and fresh fruit (at least if you add fruit you can pretend its all healthy)
• Add as a topping to grits
• Chop up and make a breakfast burrito out of it along with eggs, cheese, salsa, and your other favorite ingredients
• Just eat it right out of the air fryer you barbarian, come on, you know you just want to jam a fork into it and eat it as is
• Serve with slow cooker cinnamon buns for a salty sweet combination

Storing Air Fryer Breakfast Sausages

Despite being overly processed meat with loads of salt, breakfast sausages do go bad relatively quickly.

To store, place the air fryer breakfast sausages into an air tight container and place it in the fridge for up to about 3 to 5 days.

We strongly recommend not eating them much past that or if they develop a funny smell or slime on them.

You can also freeze them for about 6 months, and they will stay fresh.

You can either reheat in the microwave or in the air fryer at 350 degrees for about 5 minutes.

Tips and Tricks

Air fryer breakfast sausages are about as straight forward as it gets when it comes to cooking.

But since people like to think that some magic set of tips and tricks can help in all situations, here you go:

• Unless you do plan to eat the sausage links or patties like a barbarian right out of the air fryer, use the cooking time to prepare your other food like eggs, toast, bacon (yes, more meat), or any other things you plan to serve. This is called time management. Use it to your advantage.
• Air Fryers get hot (go figure), so use adequate precaution. Tongs, spatulas, and forks work well to get the sausage into a warm air fryer basket or out when done cooking. You don’t have to prove your stengthen by grabbing them with your fingers.
• Though air fryers take a lot of guess work out of cooking sausage, you may want to check the links or patties after about 8 or 9 minutes of cooking. If they look done or like they may be startng to burn, it’s probably time to take them out. They are generally ready when they look slightly charred with golden brown areas.
• Air fryer breakfast sausages need to reach an internal temperature of 160°F (71°C) to safely eat. We’ve never actually inserted a meat thermometer into sausage before, but if you want, that’s the best way to be sure. If not, look for signs it is done, like charring and turning a slight golden brown.
• Love sausage? Try air fryer Italian sausage and peppers paired with sweet potato fries for dinner!