Fish and Chips

I have, I will admit, been terrible at keeping this blog up-to-date recently. I hope I manage to keep going at it; this post is from some time ago, but I though I may as well post it up. This marks the return of the deep-fat-fryer to kitchen proceedings in our house, spurred on largely by my housemate. I must mention at this point that this was a collaborative effort between he and I; we've found that when deep frying things in the past, it's easier, quicker and safer to have one person watching the fryer and the other free to get things ready.

On the way home from work, we saw some Plaice which provided my housemate with a sudden craving for battered fish. His suggestion was to have this with mash, though I insisted that if we were to learn how to batter fish, we may as well do it properly and fry up some chips, too. I never cared about my waistline, anyway. Equipped with Plaice, a bag of Maris Pipers and a tin of mushy peas (essential, no?), we headed back home to read up on the intricacies of frying fish and chips, and quickly decided to ignore Heston Blumethal's advice; as it was just too complicated for a Monday evening.

Instead, we cooked the chips using our existing knowledge, and took a batter recipe from the BBC Good Food website, making the rest up as we went along. So, the batter was made using flour, salt and enough cold sparkling water to make a mixture that was the right thickness. The fish were floured, dipped in the batter, and fried until golden; about 5-6 minutes. The chips were cooked in the same way as my previous article on steak frites, but were this time slightly thicker cut. The results shocked us rather: the fish came out with a crisp batter, reminiscent of a good fish and chip shop. There was something lacking, though. The batter had a very 'clean' taste compared with that from a shop; maybe I need to change the oil in my deep fat fryer less often...