As anyone who follows the Slimming World diet plan will know, finding ways of adapting popular takeaway dishes to become "low-syn" versions is all part of the fun. And now a new product from Slimming World can help you do exactly that, with the launch of its own range of sausage patties.
Because, as we have discovered, you can use these sausage burgers to make an extremely convincing dupe of McDonald's double sausage and egg McMuffins. And the best thing is, if you're savvy you can make a breakfast muffin with them to be entirely syn-free.
"Syn" points are a way of adding up higher calorie and fat foods on the Slimming World plan to allow you to still have the odd "treat" food, while effectively managing your weight loss. The concept is based around eating as many "free foods" as possible, that's things like meat, fish, vegetables and fruit, to maximise your weight loss while eating healthily.
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The new sausage patties have gone on sale exclusively at Iceland, which sells a full range of Slimming World frozen goods and ready meals that are all "free food", eg they have no syns on the diet plan. They're not currently available to buy online at Iceland, so you'll have to go down to your local store to get them, priced at £3 for a pack of six.
If you've ever looked up the syn values for McDonald's items, then you'll know a double sausage and egg McMuffin comes in at an estimated 28.5 syns. That's most slimmers' syn allowance for TWO DAYS (as you're allowed around 10-15 syns a day depending on your weight loss goal).
But make it at home and, if you're using your Healthy Extra A and B options, you can actually get a JUST as tasty breakfast muffin for no syns at all. What's not to love?
To test it all out I tried a couple of different ways of doing it. Now if you want it to be no syns at all, you will need to use a wholemeal muffin as your Healthy Extra B option for the day and a cheese slice that comes under the Healthy Extra A option.
The sausage patties say on the box they can be grilled or fried, so I decided to grill them, which took around 11 minutes. They only take 7 minutes to fry from frozen as they're a slim meat pattie.
I then poached an egg (eggs are free food on Slimming World) and assembled it all into a lightly toasted muffin with the two patties and cheese slice. Now, clearly the patties are a lot lower in fat than the Maccies version, but they still retained a lovely moist flavour in the bun.
The wholemeal muffin version I assembled was tasty and similar to a McDonald's sausage and egg mcmuffin - particularly the patties themselves which had a nice sort of salty sage-y punch to them. But if you want to make it even MORE similar, convincingly similar in my opinion, then consider using 7 of your daily syns on a white muffin, to fully replicate the Maccies style.
I used a Warburton's white toasting muffin for this, and I was amazed at the results. It tasted just as good as a McDonald's sausage and egg mcmuffin - but without the worry of 28 syns when I'd polished it all off.
And, cooking it at home means you can make your egg runny, which they never are in the McDonald's version. Which means you get the joyful trickle of runny egg all over the meaty patties, delicious.
Now, if you're wanting to be really good on your Slimming World plan, you could also add some "speed food" vegetables to the whole package. This is a way of firing up your weight loss and filling you up for longer with vitamin-dense veg.
It would work well to add some spinach, or perhaps a large mushroom. And on the Slimming World box for the product, their suggestion would be to keep the whole thing "free" by layering up the patties with egg, spinach and tomatoes for a truly syn-free experience instead of using a muffin.
For those following a calorie-controlled diet, on the McDonald's official website a double sausage and egg McMuffin comes in at 551 calories and a hefty 32g of fat. Using the calorie and fat content on the items I used here, the white muffin version using the Slimming World patties, egg and a slice of cheese would come in at 410 calories and with 15g of fat.
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