It’s finally FALL here in north Georgia. After a couple of days of rain, we have a sunny, cool, breezy day that feels like the seasons have finally started to change. We may still get a short burst of “third summer” in the next couple of weeks, but I’m hoping not.
This cool, crisp weather makes me feel like cooking and so this Sunday has been a day of “food prep”. Some of it is for the upcoming week and some of it is to fill the freezer with quick and easy items to facilitate dinner over the upcoming holiday season. Things like Italian tomato sauce, beef vegetable soup, a couple of batches of chicken broth, and a big pot of lentil stew. We’ll get to that at some point, but this post is going to be about my caving in to the “egg bite” trend … and wondering why I didn’t do this sooner.
After seeing a few people talking about them on my various FB groups I decided to take the plunge and went all in with making up my own recipe, flying by the seat of my pants. It turned out pretty well if I do say so myself. (And K agrees; he ate one and would have had 2 or 3 more if I hadn’t warned him off, saying these were for breakfast the coming week!)
Also I call these “egg bites” but each serving is about 4-5 bites for the average person. The perfect amount for a quick breakfast with some fruit. Or serve 2 per person if you are feeding hungry guys the way I am.
Here’s the recipe, along with some commentary and ideas along the way. Let me know if you make these and if you make any changes or substitutions and how you liked them!
Spinach & Sausage Sous-vide Egg Bites
- 1 dozen large eggs
- 1 cup cottage cheese (I used 4% but you can use low fat if you want)
- 6 oz Jimmy Dean original breakfast sausage (about 1/2 roll)
- 4 oz shredded sharp cheddar cheese
- 1 medium yellow onion
- 8 oz chopped spinach
- 1 tbsp butter (for greasing the containers)
- salt and pepper to taste
- 13 small jelly jars or canning jars
I started off by setting the sous-vide cooker to 172 deg and letting it bring the water up to heat.
I mixed an even dozen eggs and 1 cup of cottage cheese in a bowl with my electric mixer. I could have used the blender or the stick blender to break up all the curds in the cottage cheese and I might do that next time, but for this time, the mixer worked just fine. I added quite a bit of black pepper to this mixture – about a full tablespoon and maybe a little more. Adjust this to your taste.
While I was breaking and mixing eggs, I browned the breakfast sausage in the skillet. I just used regular Jimmy Dean brand original sausage, but you can use whatever you like. I crumbled it and cooked it until it was no longer pink and then drained it really well on paper towels.
While the sausage was draining, I used a little bit of the remaining sausage grease to saute a medium yellow onion and then added in an 8 oz bag of frozen chopped spinach and cooked that down until all the moisture steamed off.
I used the softened butter to brush the inside of each jar so the eggs wouldn’t stick when cooking.
Then I began building my cups: each cup contained the following:
- .25 oz shredded cheese
- .25 oz cooked sausage
- ~2 tbsp of the onion and spinach mixture
- ~3 tbsp of the egg and cottage cheese mixture
Once the cups were assembled, I gave each of them a stir with a skewer to mix up the contents, then put on the lids and tightened them until just fingertip firm.
Cook the jars for a minimum of 1 hour (I let mine go for 1:15 while I was doing something else – and that the beauty of sous-vide, that you don’t have to be super precise with cooking time). Then remove from the water and let cool a bit before refrigerating the entire container or removing them from the container and freezing them or storing them in the fridge.
Nutritional information per container: Cals – 163 | Fat – 13g. | Carbs – 2.6g. | Protein – 13g.