Ah, this takes recipe takes me back.  The fried Goldfish mozzarella sticks were the first Goldfish-crusted concoction I ever posted to this blog, back when daily views topped at a measly 1 a day; far from the staggering 3 views a day I receive now.  We’ve come a long way.  In an effort to stay humble and remember my roots, I thought it would be fun to try this recipe again, but switch it up and bake them instead of frying.  Sounds like a good idea, right?  Well you’re wrong.  You’ve never been more wrong about anything in your life.  This was a trash fire of an experiment, a hot mess of biblical proportions.  Let me explain.

Given that there are jillions of baked mozzarella stick recipes on the internet, one would think that this would be easy to pull off and enjoyable for all.  The authors of these recipes are all lying tramps.  This is not easy to pull off, and they came out like straight garbage, yet I followed every step of these recipes to the tee.  I basically mimicked the steps of my fried Goldfish mozzarella sticks recipe up until it was cooking time – coat the cheese sticks with egg, then the ground Goldfish, then egg again and Golfish again.  Each coated stick goes on a foiled baking sheet and into the freezer for 8-24 hours.  All was good until that point.  I preheated the oven to 400 (this was the average temperature from all the recipes I read), and once it was nice and toasty in there, I threw the sticks in for the 5 minutes or so (5-7 minutes was the average baking time from these dumb ass recipes).  After the 5 minutes were up, I took them out and looked at them.  And cried.  The cheese was melting all over but the coating wasn’t cooked at all.  You ever drop an ice cream cone in the sand?  Yeah.  The oven had a thermometer in it so I knew for sure it was at 400, and I timed it diligently with my trusty wristwatch.

I therefore conclude that baking mozzarella sticks is not possible, and that it’s a huge scam propagated by Big Oven.  This was a disaster on par with my twice-baked potato fail of 2013.  I had photos of this debacle, but they are so gruesome that they’ll likely get flagged by WordPress for being too obscene.  I also lost the cord that hooks my camera up to my laptop, so there’s that too.

Lesson learned.  Fry everything.