After learning about grilled cheese with mozzarella sticks in it, my husband mentioned it intermittently as something we should make for dinner. At first I thought he was joking, because we are adults and don’t need mozzarella sticks in our grilled cheeses. Then I realized he wasn’t joking, so why not?

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Are mozzarella sticks on a grilled cheese any good?

I went in with the hypothesis that the mozzarella sticks wouldn’t stay warm and gooey enough, nor would the outside stay crunchy enough, for the sandwich to be altogether pleasant. To see if one technique might yield longterm goo better than the other, I baked half the mozzarella sticks in the oven and made the other half in the air fryer. Sure enough, neither stayed particularly gooey in the center once added to a grilled cheese, sliced, and plated—by then, their cheese had congealed into a firm mass.

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While that might have annoyed me had I just been eating the mozzarella sticks on their own, it actually didn’t bother me at all in the context of a grilled cheese. Compared to the sandwich’s crispy, buttery bread and its gooey melted cheese slices, the sticks were kind of spongy. They almost played the role of halloumi, in a way that we found welcome.

We also played around with the sliced cheese, making one sandwich with American, a la Denny’s, and one with cheddar, because that’s what we usually make grilled cheese with. The American provided a stronger flavor contrast with the mozzarella sticks, whereas the cheddar-mozzarella combo was more cohesive. I preferred the cheddar; my husband preferred American. This is the polar opposite of our usual cheese preferences, but I guess the mozzarella stick grilled cheese just put us in a different state of mind.

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Using everyone’s favorite appetizer to adorn other dishes isn’t too rare, nor is it exclusive to Denny’s. Wendy’s recently debuted a burger in New Zealand topped with mozzarella sticks, a creation that arose organically among fast food customers and is sometimes referred to as a meatball sub. Additionally, fans of the Dallas Cowboys can reportedly get a similar burger at AT&T Stadium this year:

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I went into this thinking I would not like this sandwich. And I don’t love it enough to make it all the time. But on those bone-chilling, puddle-splashed-jeans rainy autumn days? You’ll find me cozied up with one.