Friday, May 30, 2014

Test Kitchen: Adventures in Gluten-Free Fried Cheese

Last weekend I made an initial test batch of fried cheese (which, by the way, was amazing when dipped in the salsa).  Here is where I started:

Don't mix this with everything else:
1 cup gluten-free baking mix flour blend
24 pack of string cheese 

Mix all of this together:
1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp cayenne powder
1/4 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp sea salt
2 eggs
3/4 cup water

Mix indicated ingredients, then dip each mozzerella stick into the batter, roll it in the gluten free baking mix, and fry.  I found that it was a delicate balance between keeping the oil hot enough to cook them quickly without browning them too much.  Hint:  if your oil is smoking, it's probably too hot.

I attempted double dipping (batter, flour, batter, flour) on a couple, and while it kept the cheese from leaking out as much, it made the amount of cooked batter a bit too much of a mouthful.  Flavor reviews from test subjects were favorable (ie., they disappeared quickly). 

Tonight's experiment used the same basic ingredients in three different ways.

I separated the egg and water into one dish, and changed the amounts:

Batter:
2 eggs
1/4 cup water

Blended in magic bullet.

Seasoned flour:

2/3 cup brown rice flour
1/3 cup potato flour
1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp sea slt

Seasoned bread crumbs:
4 slices dried (in the oven for 10 minutes at 300) gluten-free white bread, food processed into crumbs
1 tsp Italian seasoning

Okay.  For the first batch I rolled them in ONLY the flour, then the batter, then the flour again, and fried them.  The general consensus was that they were too grainy.  This is how they turned out:


For the second batch I rolled them in the flour, then the batter, then the breadcrumbs.  I filled in the gaps with the flour mix.  They got better reviews, but I was told that the first experiment was better.


At that point, I added 1 tsp of garlic and 1 tsp of seasoned salt to the flour blend, then mixed it with the bread crumb mixture.  I used the batter, then the new flour mix, then batter again, then pressed the breadcrumb/flour mixture around each stick.  The flavor was deemed a huge improvement, but the batter fell apart, as you can see from the photos.


You can see that as the flavor improved from left to right, the consistency of the batter got worse.  This is clearly going to take some more work.  If anyone has suggestions, feel free to help me on my way!

  
Left is today's first experiment, 
immediately next to that is #2, 
then the two on the right are from the last batch.

1 comment:

  1. I hear that freezing them first helps them not fall apart so easily.

    ReplyDelete