MOZZARELLA STICKS WITH MARINARA DIPPING SAUCE
Ingredients
Tomato Dipping Sauce
- about 300 g (10 oz) tomato puree
- basil leaves
- about 2-3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- about 1/2 shallot finely chopped
- 2 garlic cloves
- salt to taste
- oregano
- red pepper chilli powder optional
Mozzarella Sticks
- 270 g (9,5 oz) Mozzarella cheese do not use fresh Mozzarella for this recipe
- about 60 g (1/2 cup) all purpose flour
- 2 eggs
- about 120 g (1 cup) fine breadcrumbs
- about 120 g (1+1/2 cup) panko bread crumbs
- salt to taste
- peanut oil for frying or other deep frying vegetable oil
Instructions
Tomato Dipping Sauce
- In a medium size saucepan, place olive oil, finely chopped shaollt, 2 garlic clove and place over medium heat.
- Fry and stir often until shallots become translucent (be careful to not burn it!).
- Add tomato sauce, basil leaves and bring to a simmer.
- Place a lid on top of the saucepan, low the heat and slowly simmering over low heat until thickening (at least 25 minutes). Stir occasionally.
- When thickened and it's ready, remove the garlic cloves, salt to taste, add oregano, red pepper powder and remove from heat.
Mozzarella Sticks
- Cut mozzarella into 7,5cm-3inch equal long sticks.
- In a small bowl beat the eggs with salt.
- Coat Mozzarella stick with flour, then dip into egg wash, roll into fine breadcrumbs, make a second dip into egg wash and coat with panko bread.
- Repeat until coat every Mozzarella stick.
- Heat penut oil at 175°C-345°F (watch my recipe video below if you don't have a thermometer to know when the oil is ready) and fry the sticks. they are ready very quickly (less than 1 minute), be careful to not leave them too much in the oil or Mozzarella will ooze out.
- Drain out onto frying paper (if you don't have frying paper, you can use kitchen paper or drain onto a wire rack).
- Serve immediately with the Tomato Sauce.
Video
Notes
Hello, I am Valentina! Welcome to How Tasty!
I am an Italian girl in love with baking and cooking. I’ve been raised in a cooking family, baking since I was a little girl and learning from my mom and my professional chef grandma.
I created the Youtube channel How Tasty in 2017 to share with you my passion.
You don’t need to be a professional cook to follow all my recipes thanks to the video tutorials and the tips & hints you can find here.
Let’s cook!
Tips:
This recipe is incredibly easy to make, but you should pay attention while you bread Mozzarella sticks. It’s very important you make a double coating with eggs and breadcrumbs, if you just make one coat, your Mozzarella would oouze out while frying.
So you should coat the sticks into flour, then into egg wash, into fine breadcrumbs, the second dip into egg wash and the last coating into panko (or fine breadcrumbs too if you don’t have panko bread!).
I’ve made the marinara dipping sauce using the homamde tomato puree my mom make every Summer with San Marzano fresh tomatoes. It’s only made with tomato puree and fresh basil leaves. You can of course use any type of tomato puree, if you go for store-bought sauce, you can also consider to use canned tomatoes and puree them.
You can also adjust the ingredients amount like garlic, shallot and chilli powder, according to your taste. In Italy we are used to have delicate tomato sauce, we use great quality ingredients, so we don’t want to cover our tomato taste with too much garlic or shallot, but this is up to you.
The texture of the sauce is rustic, if you prefer a smooth creamy marinara sauce, you can use a dipping blender to process it.
Do not use fresh Mozzarella for this recipe (I mean the Mozzarella soaked into its water), because it realese too much water for this recipe. In Italy we use the mozzarella block we call “Mozzarella for Pizza” because we usually use this kind of Mozzarella block for Pizza because it’s dry and it doesn’t release water while cooking/baking.
Cut Mozzarella into equal size sticks: with 270 g (9,5 oz) of Mozzarella I got 15 sticks, 7,5cm (3 inch) long and about 1,5 cm (0,5 inch) thick.
