Mozzarella bocconcini recipe
Bocconcini translates as ‘small mouthfuls’. These are great fun as canapés or made in a batch and put onto your dinner table just as your guests arrive.
Children love them because they are very tasty and the stringy cheese sometimes stretches to comical lengths. Like the arancini, you can serve these on a toothpick, lollipop-style. Panko, if you haven’t used it before, is a very handy breadcrumb mix that you can pick up in oriental supermarkets.
Ingredients
- 200 g panko breadcrumbs
- 1 lemon, zest only
- 1 handful of oregano leaves, chopped
- 1 cup Italian 00 flour, salted
- 1 medium free-range egg, beaten
- 1 x 125g ball of buffalo mozzarella, cut into 6 chunks
- 1 l vegetable oil, for deep-frying
Details
- Cuisine: Italian
- Recipe Type: Starter
- Difficulty: Easy
- Preparation Time: 5 mins
- Cooking Time: 15 mins
- Serves: 3
Step-by-step
- Prepare your coating mix by combining the panko breadcrumbs with the zest and oregano. Put the salted flour on one plate and the beaten egg in a shallow bowl. Take a piece of mozzarella, roll in the salted flour, then in the beaten egg, then the panko mix. Repeat with the other pieces. You can do this a few hours or the morning before cooking and chill until needed.
- Half fill a deep pan with the vegetable oil and bring it up to 190°C (or until a cube of bread dropped in the oil turns golden in less than a minute). Deep-fry the coated mozzarella until golden brown. Drain on kitchen paper and serve hot.
Recipe from Polpo by Russell Norman. Text by Russell Norman, 2012. Photographs by Jenny Zarins, 2012. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2012.
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