British · Main
Fish and Chips
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, an earthy, grounding base.
Ingredients
- 4 thick cod or haddock fillets, skinned, patted bone-dry
- Batter: 200g flour + 50g rice flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 300ml ICE-COLD beer
- 1.5kg floury potatoes (Maris Piper), cut fat
- Beef dripping or neutral oil for the fryer
- Malt vinegar, flaky salt, mushy peas, tartare
Equipment
Thermometer · Deep-fry pot
The skills inside
Deep fryingBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Beer Styles: The Two-Family MapFryer Setups & Oil Management
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · fish · alcohol
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
- Chips first, twice: blanch at 130°C until tender and pale; drain and cool.
- Whisk the batter at the last second: cold, barely mixed, lumps welcome.
- Flour the fish, then batter; fry at 180°C, 6–8 min, until amber and rigid. 8 min
- Chips back in at 190°C until bronzed. Salt everything; vinegar like you mean it.
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.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
Deep frying 96 recipes
- The oil was at temperature before anything went in, measured rather than guessed, and the vessel is no more than two-thirds full.
- Everything went in dry. Surfaces are patted down and any coating is not dripping, because water hitting hot oil erupts and is the one accident this technique actually has.
- The oil recovers between batches. It is back at temperature before the next load goes in rather than falling further with each one.
- A steady vigorous bubbling that slows as it finishes: the bubbles are the food’s own water leaving, so a piece that has gone quiet has stopped drying out and is done.
- Seasoned or finished in the first seconds out of the oil, while the surface is still hot and will hold what lands on it. Anything applied to a cooled crust sits on top and falls off.
Where it goes wrong Too much went in at once and the oil temperature collapsed. The crust forms slowly while the food sits in warm fat absorbing it rather than shedding steam, and it comes out heavy and greasy instead of crisp, which no amount of draining afterwards will fix.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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