Bar Food Night!

After a bit of experimenting with some weirder deep fried foods, I wanted to get back to thinking inside the box. I wanted to try my hand at some more traditional deep fried foods, but I had to think about how to get around the "eating a meal in shifts problem" I discovered with the fried fish, pickles, and hush puppies. The obvious solution was to make bar appetizers, which are easy and enjoyable to eat in shifts. I guess some people might say the more obvious solution is not to deep fry everything in your meal, but that's not the direction I wanted to go for this meal.

So, I looked up recipes and bought supplies for onion rings, mozzarella sticks, and sweet potato fries. I got regular potatoes for fries too, but I hadn't pre-cut those by the time we assembled to start cooking, and we were on a fairly tight deadline, as we wanted to be finished for the series premier of Parks and Recreation.

We started with the mozzarella sticks, because I was most excited about trying these. I used this recipe, which specifically said you can use the string cheese you can buy in stores. This seemed easiest for now, although sometime I'll try cutting a fancier ball of mozzarella into strips.

I cut each piece of string cheese in half to make these a nicer size. This one makes a little more mess elsewhere, since you need three bowls. The first on has flour and cornstarch. you roll the cheese in this to make the egg stick. Dipping it in the egg wash is the next step. Then you put it in the breadcrumbs and garlic salt.

I was noticing that after taking it out of the breadcrumbs, that some of the breading was sticking to my fingers and not the cheese. So, I drew upon one of the earlier lessons learned, and double dipped the cheese back into the egg, and then back into the breadcrumbs again. This really covered them well. Then, I carefully place each into a fryer basket and once they were all done, I dipped them into 365F oil (not the maximum temperature, for once).

They are done in less than a minute, so don't overdo it with these. Don't worry too much though, because from what I saw, the worst that can happen is the cheese gets too melty and starts oozing out of the breadcrumb shell. It's actually more disappointing if one isn't melty all the way through when you bite into it. I was excited to see that these don't float, so you don't have to worry about them not cooking evenly.

Although the recipe says to cook for 30 seconds, we pulled these out after about 45 seconds and dumped them onto a paper towel. While you should wait for most deep fried foods to cool down, don't wait too long for these, because the cheese will start to solidify again. But take careful bites, until you can really gauge how how the cheese is, because you don't want to burn yourself.

If you checked out the recipe I linked to, you'll see that these got an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars. Those judges are too harsh; these were incredible! They were very soft and cheesy and the garlic salt on with the breadcrumbs really was a great touch. I'd be hard pressed to say I've ever had better mozzarella stick elsewhere. These were so good, once we finished the sweet potato fries and onion rings, we made another batch of these.

The sweet potato fries were next, because they were super easy and we could make the batter for the onion rings while the fries cooked. I cut them into fries the day before, and soaked them in cold water, as described by this recipe. You only need to soak them for 15 minutes, but other recipes said up to two days in water was fine, so storing them in water overnight was the easiest for me so they would be ready the next day after work.

When you are ready to cook them, you dry them thoroughly on paper towels. You want to get all the excess water off, because if you don't, the oil will get angry and spit at you.

For these, I put the oil at 350F, and put the fries in for 5 minutes. I think we ended up cooking them closer to 7 or 8 minutes, but the important thing is to watch them closely after a couple minutes, and just take them out when they look ready. These sink too, so for at least the first several minutes, you can drop it in and leave them be.

As you can see from the photo, they lose their color a little, but they were good. We put a lot of salt on them, and I like them with ketchup, but we were all enjoying them too much to even take the break to get the ketchup out of the fridge.

When I try these again, I'd like to study a few recipes to get them a little bit crispier. These were great, but if they can be crispy on the outside, that'll be even better.

Well, that's all the time we have for today, so I'll cover the onion rings in my next post. And maybe I'll also throw in, at no extra charge, a writeup of the normal French fries, which we deep fried a few nights later.

Finally, I want to thank everyone for their support so far. We've seen literally dozens of visitors from 9 countries across 4 continents and 14 states and the District of Columbia! I've also gotten so nice compliments on Facebook and by email. And some of those people weren't even related to me! So, thanks, tell your friends, and keep spreading the word!