I am not good at breading things. You might remember the onion rings I tried to bake, or maybe those sake mushrooms I was supposed to dredge. I'm not so good at it. I end up with clumps of breading all over my fingers, all over the bowl, and really uneven breading on the stuff I'm making. I always look at how perfectly dredged everyone else's food is when they fry or bake things and I always wonder what I'm doing wrong. So when Week 31's theme popped up as "breading/dredging," I let out an audible groan and then tried to find something I could bake and hopefully not screw up. I decided to make these breaded and baked zucchini chips paired with this garlic aioli.
BREADED AND BAKED ZUCCHINI CHIPS
I love zucchini chips (or zucchini fries) but I don't deep fry at home, so I needed a version that would work for baking. After all my breading experiments, I didn't trust myself to improvise on this, so I followed the recipe fairly closely.
For the zucchini chips, I needed:
- 2 zucchini ($2.06)
- 1 egg ($0.19)
- 2 tbsp milk ($0.10)
- 2 garlic cloves ($0.05)
- 1/2 cup Italian breadcrumbs ($0.15)
- 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese ($0.50)
- 1-2 tbsp chopped parsley ($0.15)
- black pepper to taste ($0.05)
The entire side of zucchini chips cost about $3.25. Not bad at all. Way more than you would get at a restaurant in a side dish.
The steps for making the zucchini chips were straightforward. Mince the garlic, beat the egg, and mix both in a shallow bowl with the milk. Mix breadcrumbs, grated Parmesan, chopped parsley, and black pepper in another shallow bowl. So far, so good.
Slice zucchini into slices about 1/4 inch thick. Dip each slice into the egg mixture and then dredge in breadcrumb mixture. Lay breaded slices out on a baking sheet coated with nonstick cooking spray. The recipe gave prep time as 15 minutes, but it definitely took me more than 15 minutes just to dredge the slices. I don't know why this takes me so long and it's still not done well.
Those don't look so bad. For the first 3/4 of the slices, it actually worked decently well. The breading clumped up a little bit on my fingers, but the breadcrumbs in the bowl didn't clump up until the end. It didn't stick as perfectly as it could have, but there were some really good slices in there. I tried to figure out why the breading stuck so well to some slices and not to others, but I couldn't determine why. I was happy that at least it wasn't a total failure like the onion rings!
Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes and then flip the slices. Bake for another 5+ minutes until crispy. I did it for about 6-7 minutes, but probably could have baked them longer to get them more crispy.
The zucchini chips turned out pretty well, but would have been better if more breading had stuck to the slices and if I had baked them longer. Also, they would have been crispier if they were thinner slices, but I tried to do about 1/4 inch for all of them. But the flavor was good. The fresh parsley and the grated Parmesan, and also the fact that they were freshly breaded, made them taste better than if you had gotten pre-breaded zucchini chips out of a package.
GARLIC AIOLI
I thought a good accompaniment for the zucchini chips would be a garlic aioli. Aioli is usually a good dipping side, even if it does make relatively healthy vegetables much less healthy!
The aioli only had a few ingredients:
- 3/4 cup mayonnaise ($0.72)
- a few cloves of garlic, minced ($0.05)
- 2 large spoonfuls of lemon juice ($0.20)
- salt and pepper to taste ($0.08)
The aioli was about $1.05, and we still have quite a bit left over to use for something else (maybe fish sticks?).
To make the aioli, just mix everything together and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. The chilling lets the flavors meld together and also thickens up the sauce. This was pretty good. Nice and garlicky, and also a good match for the panko chicken tenders that we made (that I did not bread) with dinner.
In the end, this was a pretty good experiment and quite an affordable dinner (about $7 or so total for both of us, once you add in the chicken). The zucchini chips may not have been breaded perfectly, and there were certainly some chips that didn't end up very breaded in the end, but they were still tasty. I wouldn't mind making them again, but the prep time for me whenever I do anything with dredging takes forever, so I don't think it'll be anytime soon (unless we can figure out how to go faster). But at least for once, I dredged something and it wasn't a total mess!
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