This recipe is part of a larger dinner party menu you can find on my Substack. The category is Night of 1000 Tomatoes, and it features five courses centered around tomatoes. You can find the recipe booklet and a handy party prep schedule here.

I’m a big fan of schnitzel. When I was in university, my biweekly indulgence was a chicken schnitzel sandwich from a campus pub. Looking back, I realize it wasn’t a particularly compelling sandwich, but when knockoff cereal was your norm, you tend to covet a crisp chicken cutlet no matter its quality level. The pub where I got that sandwich recently closed, so the nostalgia has been real. And that nostalgia reawakened a schnitzel-related idea I’d been toying with years ago: vegetarian schnitzel. Now, when approaching this quest, it seems only natural to start with tofu, but it just didn’t feel right to me. Then it hit me, Mozzarella Schnitzel. Essentially a mozzarella stick in a “cutlet” format. It couldn’t fail. Well, it could and it did. But eventually it was a success, and that’s why we’re all here.