Baked Mozzarella Bites

My mission: To cook 5 recipes each month*.

This is recipe 3 of 5 for the month of July.

Baked Mozzarella Bites



Ingredients:

1/3 cup of panko (Japanese breadcrumbs)
3 tablespoons of egg substitute
3 sticks 2% mozzarella string cheese
1/4 a cup of marinara sauce

Did someone give the Cooking Light writer duties to my 5th grade ego for this month? First was the Ham, egg and cheese on an english muffin and now comes this lazy mozzarella sticks recipe. I shouldn't be this annoyed with the recipe choices for an August issue of Cooking Light. I get that they are thinking about kids and back to school treats, but right now it is really freaking hot here on the surface of the sun  in New York and it is causing me to be a bit cranky.

Break out the reduced fat string cheese. You can't beat Polly-O string cheese. It's in the hall of fame. I've tried the Weight Watchers one and it's just complete shit. Cut them into 1 inch pieces or make 4 pieces out of one string cheese.

Preheat the oven to 425 (In my apartment this took about 2 minutes to achieve. It is really that hot out) and place a third of a cup of planko crumbs onto a skillet and cook them until they are brown/slightly burnt. Once they are cooked transfer the planko to a shallow dish. This is where I roll my eyes at this recipe. Are planko crumbs really that much better for you then bread crumbs? It feels like the editors had a perfectly fine recipe here that consisted of whole wheat bread crumbs and they changed it to planko crumbs because planko is "hip" or "in" right now. Get worse.

Empty some egg substitute in a bowl add some pepper too and then dunk the string cheese in it. Really soak these guys because I tried this recipe once before and the planko would not stick to the cheese to save its life.

After the cheese is saturated with the egg mixture make like a chicken parm and toss it into the cooked planko and get it nice and covered.

Transfer to a baking sheet with foil and slide them into the oven. Here's the tricky part: Do not over cook this. If you overcook this dish you are fucked. It will turn into melted cheese. Don't leave the kitchen. It takes about 3 minutes for this dish to cook. A minute too long and it's the topping for a hamburger.

Finished Product:

This..is not very good. No amount of homemade sauce can save this dish. First of all, mozzarella string cheese has a sort of waxy coat to it. This makes for a slippery surface and a surface that doesn't let the egg substitute to stay on it. It just slides off and it makes the panko not stick to the cheese. It's awful. It's a whole lot of work for nothing. It takes okay but it's nothing to write a blog post about (hmm). It is because of this dish that I have decided to make a slight change in my little bloggy blog.

*From now on I'm not going to exclusively cook Cooking Light recipes. I will continue to use them, but there are far too many other sources of recipes that I would like to try. I have several apps with very tasty and interesting recipes that I would love to document that do not fall under the "Cooking Light" category. I will always try to cook healthy food, but it will not be my main focus (I'm training for a marathon. I think I can splurge every once in a while on some butter).

0 out of 5 stars.

Leftovers: None