You'll Never Believe Which Brand Came In Last In This Mozzarella Stick Taste Test

For my birthday (today!) my fiancée is getting me an air fryer to replace the one I broke a few years back. If you've all been keeping tabs on what happened to the old one, I had an "incident" where I tried forcing an enormous sweet potato into it. I heard a pop, and it turns out the pop was me breaking the heating element. While that thing was already kind of a piece of shit (the handle snapped off at some point), I guess it just was not meant to be.

Well, my air fryer is on the way, and I am excited to put a bunch of frozen stuff in it, including mozzarella sticks. Insider reviewed 10 brands (albeit in a toaster oven), to see how each held up. The shocker in the list wasn't so much what made it out on top, but what made it to last place, and that was the Trader Joe's brand. Apparently the breading tastes like the coating on fish sticks, and its aftertaste was greasy and stale and sour from the cheese. No, thank you.

The big winners? Sprouts Farmer's Market brand organic mozzarella sticks and Whole Foods' 365 brand mozzarella sticks. While crunchiness wasn't the star of the show for either brand, the overall flavor was what won the testers over. There was some speculation (but unconfirmed) that the store brand mozzarella sticks might have been from the same manufacturer because their ingredient lists curiously matched up and the sticks had similar flavor profiles. This is entirely possible.

That being said, most of the other sticks were passable, meaning you can't go terribly wrong with them. So in the next few weeks I'll be chowing down on some, and I will avoid putting giant sweet potatoes in my new air fryer.