Jeff Mauro’s Beer Battered Italian Mozza Balls | The Kitchen | Food Network

These are my beer battered Italian Mozza ballsokay all right fresh mozzarella these are chilling and these are the perfect poppable size wellyou need a Dipper dip right you need a Dipper absolutely not just any pizza or marinara saucewe are going to make my pepperoni maronara sauce you get it Sunny with sugar what makes it amaronara is that ground pepperoni done in a food processor okay okay the oil from thejardinera and the giardner itself so you can start with the oil from the giardner gota ton of fermented flavor in there throw the pepperoni in it nice and kind of medium let itsweat out a little bit get soft and part all that beautiful flavor okay you can throw somesalt in there and some dried Italian seasoning hold the garlic until we're ready to add theliquid and so it doesn't burn now let's start.

With the batter we got the Fresh mozz Balls hereright you can leave them in the water I got some rice flour to dredge now becomes this beer breaderusing Italian Pilsner beer right we're sticking to the theme Here Sunny we got some AP flour wegot some more rice flour we're gonna add right in the rice flour just kind of crunch crunchcrunchy crunch man it's full coverage right it's a smaller grind so yeah it's gonna get intothe cracks in the cracks exactly and it actually happens on mozzarella so we got that with apflowers some uh baking powder to help kind of Leaven it up and give it some bubs in there andplenty of salt kosher salt and this is the base the dry base of our batter next comes that Italianpilsner you can use any light beer I don't like super dark beer in my beer batters I think it'sjust like too much bitterness so it's about a cup.

But you want to kind of do this instages you don't want to over mix it that's one rule when making a good beerbatter you don't want to also destroy all those bubbles and all that effervescence whichadds lightness and airiness to your batter but you also want it to chill out in the fridge forabout 15 minutes I like that you really mixed all the dry ingredients together because youwant to do as little mixing as possible once you add liquid yeah and like you almost wantthat pancake batter Clump feel that they all say because that's going to pop in the hot oiland add again bubbles crunch all that 15 minutes in the fridge I got one ready to go right hereyou even rested like this yeah you gotta rest it you gotta rest it so Bubble Up I suggestresting it while you're doing your marinara.

Sauce you got your oil looking at 350 right hereI got some peanut oil and it tightens up obviously and this is pretty pretty tight that's why Ihave a little bit more beer to add a last dose of that carbonation in there all right now we gotour beautiful balls here up yes you can perfect and the garlic before that actually in the oilso make sure you sweat out that garlic for about 30 seconds and I'm gonna toss these and givethat kind of fep station going without the Egg of course instead of the breadcrumb we're goingto do a batter but this helps that batter cling and that's all rice flour now we can take theseguys and drop them right in that batter and why and why'd you decide to do this kind of batterinstead of like traditional breadcrumb in high school we had cheese sticks right it come in fivecheese sticks which is an odd number yeah where.

They rock hard you know what they were they're alllike limp they're one was going and I left one was hanging a right the the breadcrumbs were barelyhanging on barely even yellow let alone golden but they were gratifying it away and I was likeit's been my mission to find great cheese sticks ever since and it's it's really difficult becausemy favorite type of cheese sticks is a battered cheese sticks and they're really hard to findmostly they're just breadcrumbs they're Italian bread crumbs it's just like you think about likebreaded fish versus battered fish I mean what kind of evokes that Pub style and if you've ever hadtrue you know fried cheese curds they're always beer battered so it's just kind of okay so it'slike a combo it's a combo of everything and when I was testing this out it was my goal to do awhole log of fresh mozzarella and I made about.

Eight of them and I went through a tremendousamount of cheese and I just couldn't Crack the Code because it wouldn't melt enough because youknow fresh mozzarella is very like a whole big yep so right into that hot oil one at a time sothey don't stick together it's like donut holes here we got my oil here at about 375 perfecttemperature to get them golden brown while melting that interior is the children temperaturethe cheese I recommend kind of having out for a little bit just so it's not rock hard coldwhen you put in there and kind of expedite the multitude of it if you will multitude just wantto move around to their golden brown delicious all right these are going to take a second I havesome in the oven so you guys don't wait no more we cannot wait on these but this is whywe took the time I took the time to make 4.

000 versions of that is because you've got it'sbeautiful are they hush puppies are they fried ones are they what are they they're fried they'regolden brown they got crackles on them yeah can you uh put that in that crock for me right thereplease honey I'm done these are hot and ready to go and of course right when they come out ofthe oil you're gonna hit it with some salt fresh mozzarella needs salt yeah for days I feellike I'm truly in the pub right now with the way that the set looks you know we got our mahoganycounters look at that maronara with all your peppers oh come on all your pepper needs all rightI'm gonna give you some who's trying it at first oh my gosh I can smell the pepperoni I lovethe pepperoni in there really that's a real definition of meat sweats right there that isright Roundup pepperoni I like this one that's.

Kind of popped open it's okay when they pop openbecause the cheese then creates a automatic seal on it much like a spaceship and that seal iscrispy cheese lattice cheese skirts shut your mouth I like these Crunchies these Crunchies Iknow I'm about to put them on there too put them right on here Sunny okay I'll tell you whatthis uh first bite what this reminds me of in Naples fried pizza oh yeah this is thepizza Frito it reminds me so much of that because that batter turns doughy you know andit's got the crispiness on the outside that melted cheese in there you get the heatof the pepperoni it's really really good