Delicious: this is how you make cheese sticks yourself

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the food lovers of online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat and what to cook. This time our chefs serve you snack foods during corona time: make your own cheese sticks.

The tastiest snack in the world, if you ask me, is temporarily out of reach due to the lockdown of the hospitality industry. I'm talking about cheese sticks, and I can easily eat two portions in one evening (okay, three). It's also wise, because snacking on an empty stomach is asking for trouble. So I make my own cheese sticks – and I can't wait to order them again at the pub.

Preparation: 15 min
Preparation: 5 min
Servings: 4

INGREDIENTS
spring roll wrappers from the freezer (you'll have plenty left over, you can make spring rolls later – or even more cheese sticks)
aged Gouda cheese (or older cheese, to taste)
peanut oil or a deep fryer
sweet chili sauce

Cheese sticks vs cheese sticks
Attention, dear snack friends: a cheese stick is something different than a cheese stick. Cheese stick: those puff pastry-things with grated cheese from the bakery. Cheese sticks, pronounced: cheese-sticks, are relatives of the flame and the cheese soufflé, a kind of mini spring rolls filled with melted cheese.

Here's how to make cheese sticks

• Let the spring roll wrappers thaw. The packaging indicates how long that takes.
• Cut the cheese into strips the size of fries. I guess: one centimeter by one centimeter, and then about four centimeters long.
• Place a spring roll wrapper like a diamond in front of you. Place a piece of cheese on it. Fold the bottom flap up over the cheese. Fold the sides inward. Then roll the cheese stick up.
• Turn on the deep fryer. If you don't have one: heat a layer of oil in a pan. When the oil is hot, you can fry the cheese sticks. Just like with bitterballen, don't be greedy, don't put too many in the pan at once. After about three minutes, the cheese sticks are perfect. Let them drain on a piece of kitchen paper, serve them with a bowl of sweet chili sauce, as it should be.

Experiment: failed
Regular cheese sticks, I thought: that recipe could be better. So I immediately tried to stuff the chili sauce inside the cheese stick. That seemed delicious to me, and also innovative, and then I could invent a brand new snack during the corona situation for which I could sell the recipe for a fortune so that I would soon be giving Ted talks about how good things can come from a bad situation. But unfortunately, that resulted in an explosion in the pan and the cheese sticks got black edges because I was fantasizing about my impending wealth, so let me cautiously conclude that this innovative recipe needs some improvements.