Fried cheese curds 揚げチーズカード

My wife somehow got into making fresh cheese curds. She started this when she made an Indian style spinach curry with cheese curds. We are looking for new ways to serve them. From watching TV food shows, we learned about fried cheese curds. They appear to be specially famous and popular at county fairs in Wisconsin. Although the ones in Wisconsin are "cheddar cheese curds" and are yellow, my wife's are white in color. (I am not sure what the differences is but cheddar cheese curds appear to go through the "cheddaring process" which includes the addition of plant extracts such as annatto seeds which give the curd an orange-yellow color). In any case, regardless of what kind of cheese curds are used, breading and frying a cheese product cannot go wrong. I am sure this is not authentic Wisconsin but it was sure good enough for us.



The cheese curds do not melt, although they do get soft; nice crunchy outside and soft inside.



Batter:
There appears to be several variations, some use beer and others use baking powder for leavening.  I chose one without beer.

1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs beaten
1/2 milk

This is the original amount for 1 lb of cheese curds.  I made only 8 small cubes as a trial.
I halved the recipe but there was still too much batter for the amount I made.

Instead of deep frying, I use "shallow" frying.



After the surface became nicely golden, I drained them on a paper towel.



We also tried our own style of fried curds. We just coated the curds with the mixture of flour and curry powder like our baked chicken wings.



This time, I used much less oil and turned it frequently so all the surfaces browned.



This was pretty good with crunchy crust but not too oily and easier to make. We tried this without the flour coating and the curd stuck to the bottom of the pan. We will use the flour coating method make this our own fried cheese curds in the future.