Nigerian · Dessert
Chin Chin
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle.
Ingredients
- 500 g plain flour
- 120 g caster sugar
- 100 g cold butter, cubed
- 2 eggs
- 100 ml evaporated milk
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 whole nutmeg, grated
- 3 g salt
- 1 litre groundnut oil for frying
Equipment
Deep-fry pot · Grater / zester
The skills inside
Draining fried food: a rack, never paperRubbing fat into flour
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg · peanuts
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rub the butter into the flour, sugar, baking powder, nutmeg and salt until the mixture looks like damp sand.
- Beat the eggs with the milk and bring the dough together, adding the liquid a spoon at a time and stopping while it is still firm and dry to the touch.
- Rest the covered dough, then roll it to 3 mm and cut it into 1 cm squares with a knife or a pastry wheel.
- Fry at 160C (320F) in batches, stirring so they colour evenly, until the loud fizzing drops to a whisper and the pieces are pale gold.
- Drain on a rack and let them cool completely before they go into a tin, since they harden as they cool.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rubbing fat into flour 47 recipes
- The fat is cold when it starts and still firm when the rubbing stops, and the bowl has not warmed under the hands.
- Stopped early, while it still looks like coarse crumbs with pieces of fat visible in it, not worked on to a smooth even sand, which means the pieces have gone.
- Nothing is greasy or glossy and nothing has smeared into a paste against the side of the bowl.
- Liquid added last and only enough to bring it together: pressed, it just holds, with no wet patch and nothing sticking to the hand.
- Rested cold before it is rolled or shaped, so the gluten relaxes and the fat firms again after being handled.
Where it goes wrong The fat was too warm, or it was rubbed until the mixture looked uniform. Once the fat has melted into the flour there are no solid pieces left to steam apart in the oven, so the bake is sandy or tough instead of flaky, and nothing done later puts those layers back.
Draining fried food: a rack, never paper 77 recipes
- The rack was in place before the first thing went into the oil, not fetched afterwards while food waited in a spider over the pot.
- It lands on a rack with air moving underneath it. Anything set down on paper or a flat plate traps its own steam against its base.
- Salted within seconds of landing, while it is still hot enough to take seasoning.
- A minute later the underside is still as crisp as the top: no soft flat patch where it has been sitting.
- Nothing is stacked or piled while hot, however tempting it is to keep it together. A pile steams itself soft from the inside out.
Where it goes wrong It was drained on paper, or piled up to keep warm. Steam leaving the food has nowhere to go but back into the crust, so the underside softens within a minute: the crispness the frying just bought is gone before the plate reaches the table.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
- Demi-sec Champagne
- From the Taps
- Belgian tripel
- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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