Back when I first started making breaded sausage balls, air fryers weren’t a thing. But now, my trusty Ninja Foodi Dual Drawer has forced my oven into retirement for cooking picky bits and sides.
Breaded sausage balls were one of my kids’ favourite dinners when they were growing up. Even now they’ve all grown up and leaving the nest, inviting them round for tea and serving up breaded sausage balls makes their eyes light up.
So, what exactly are they?
Breaded sausage balls are like breaded chicken nuggets: sausage meat rolled in breadcrumbs and baked until golden and crispy.
There are many ways you could make these, but I’ve gone for the easiest way possible. You could prepare them in a similar way to homemade chicken nuggets: dip in flour, egg, and then breadcrumbs , but as sausage ment is sticky, you can skip straight to the breadcrumbs. It also means this dinner is a much less messy affair, particularly if you’re planning on getting your kids involved.
If you are using a cooking night to spend quality time with the family, these can be served up alongside homemade pizza; a great way to confine mess to one singular evening. All of the fun, far less washing up.
Ingredients (with prices)
- Sausage meat or sausages, I got two small packs from my local farm shop – £1.50 each
- Breadcrumbs – £1.20 for 175g, from Tesco
Total: £2.70
Serves: Four (two sausages per person)
To make this recipe friendlier to tight shopping budgets, you can find lower cost sausages. Iceland does a bag of 10 sausages for £1; or, you could spend £1.59 and get a bag of 20 sausages. For an extra nine pence, you get 12 more sausages. Of course, you will sacrifice quality, but for cheap and cheerful meals, they’ll do the job. The cost might be higher, but you can use your leftover sausages to feed the family at breakfasts, do a small BBQ, make a sausage goulash or casserole, or whip up a Toad in the Hole.
Any leftover breadcrumbs can be used to make homemade chicken mini fillets or scattered on top of a pasta bake (it gives it a nice crunch and some extra texture).
But, as we always say, check through what you’ve already got before going out to buy anything. You never know, you may already have a pack of sausages in the freezer or a half empty tub of breadcrumbs hiding behind the curry sauce.
As a final note: you can make these in advance and store them in the fridge until you’re ready to cook.
Method
To prepare, clear a section of the work top and tip a decent amount of breadcrumbs into a bowl.
You’ll need a knife, but you can use your hands if you wish… we do. Remove one drawer from the air fryer, ready to store the breaded sausage balls. You can store them on a plate (like we did) or a dish, but this way saves on washing up which is particularly handy if you don’t have a dishwasher.
Step 1
Take the sausage ment out of the packaging and separate into equal pieces. Once done, roll each piece into a ball.
If you’re using sausages, remove the skins first, then separate and roll.
Step 2
Roll each ball in the breadcrumbs, coating all sides. Once you bread a ball, place it into the air fryer drawer. Keep breading and placing until each piece of sausage meat is coated and in the drawer.
Step 3
Place the drawer back in the air fryer and set it to Air Fry for 10 minutes on the default temperature.
Once the air fryer beeps, turn each ball over and cook for a further 10 minutes, or until they’re golden all over.
To check they’re cooked, slice into one and look to see if the meat is raw or pink. If not, they’re good to serve up.
Step 4
Dish you breaded sausage balls up. Give yourself an extra one for all your hard work. You can serve these with whatever you fancy (or whichever half empty packets of chips or wedges you have in the freezer). The second drawer in your air fryer can cook these at the same time so your whole dinner can be served up together.
We served ours with potato wedges (same timings as the sausage balls; 20 minutes total with a mid-cook shake) and baby corn (we cooked these on the hob for 15 minutes).
Verdict
Breaded sausage balls are a household favourite. Using an air fryer instead of an oven only meant the family didn’t have to wait as long before getting to stuff their faces.
A pack of eight sausages can feed four people. In our house, we’ve got big appetites (especially the teenage gym rat. The same teenager who ate both portions of egg fried rice), so we make our sausage balls quite large, as you can see from the picture above, so we make a bigger portion than in the recipe above.
The breaded sausage balls are usually all gone quicker than the time it takes to ask, “do you want any sauce?”
