The trick to homemade, oven baked mozzarella sticks is to freeze the cheese before baking.
This is a very important step (or so I’ve now been told by multiple people), and makes a lot of sense, and I really wish the recipe I found on Pinterest had thought to include it.
It didn’t. And unsurprisingly what I ended up with was not delicious, individual sticks of gooey cheese. I got a cheese puddle instead. A burbling, stringy, tasty, but puddle-y pile of cheese.
Oh well.
Anyway, a few weeks ago was the Super Bowl and I was invited to watch the game with TheFather and a friend and so I wanted to make some party foods to eat while we watched. I picked crab rangoons and baked mozzarella sticks from Pinterest, as both sounded delicious and they weren’t things I had tried making before and they might be a challenge.
I love a good cooking challenge from time to time.
I started with the crab rangoons. The recipe called for wonton wrappers, fresh or canned crab meat, cream cheese, green onions, mayonnaise, lemon, and Sriracha. I went with canned crab meat and left out the Sriracha on purpose because I’m not super into spicy foods. The green onions and lemon juice were also left out because the person buying the ingredients (I won’t name any names but his initials are TheFather) forgot them even though they were on the list.
The rangoons were actually pretty easy to make. I just mixed up all the filling in a bowl, placed the wonton wrappers in a muffin tin, spooned the filling into the wrappers, and baked them. And they turned out pretty good. The shape left a little to be desired as biting around the crunchy wrapper edges was a tad perilous, but they looked and tasted okay so I would count it a WIN. They may have been a touch bland in flavor, but they paired will with dipping sauces like tarter and honey mustard (yep I dipped them in honey mustard). The next time I try the recipe I’ll be sure to have all the ingredients on hand to see if that has much effect on the flavor in the end. I might fold them up slightly more as well, just to make biting into them easier.
I made the mozzarella sticks next and I’m sure everyone knows how that turned out (since I did make small mention of it in the beginning of this post). The recipe for this one called for mozzarella cheese sticks, eggs, Panko bread crumbs, flour, milk, butter, and marinara sauce. I ran out of mozzarella sticks halfway through so ended up using some Colby Jack cheese sticks as well. I also used Italian seasoned bread crumbs instead of Panko, and threw in some shredded Parmesan cheese for flavor.
For the most part the cheese sticks were easy to make. All I had to do was cut the cheese in half, coat the sticks with flour, egg, and bread crumbs, then bake them in the oven. I even double breaded the cheese so the breading would be nice and thick and hopefully hold in the cheese as it started to melt.
Yeah that didn’t help. Not even a little bit. While the breading baked up nice and brown it did not keep any cheese from exploding out around it. By the time I pulled the cheese ‘sticks’ from the oven they were no longer stick shaped. They were just a hot mess of baked cheese on a cookie sheet.
I was kind of bummed but not really all that surprised. I had a feeling homemade mozzarella sticks were going to be harder to make than they looked. I wish I had better luck with deep frying foods, as that might have worked out better. But the two times I’ve tried frying things in the past I’ve ended up just making people sick so I don’t even try it anymore.
Anyway, so while I was able to call the crab rangoons a definite WIN, I’m gonna have to call the mozzarella sticks pretty much a FAIL. We still ate the cheese and it was still tasty, but it was more of a cheese puddle than cheese sticks and that wasn’t what I was going for. But I’ll try the recipe again sometime, and be sure to freeze the cheese first, so hopefully it will be successful.
SOURCE – crab rangoons
SOURCE – mozzarella cheese sticks
