Crispy Beer Batter Fish & Chips - Food Wishes
hello this is chef john from food wishescomm with crispy beer batter fish and
chipsthat's right anybody can do a beer
batter fish that stays crispy for a fewminutes but I'm sorry for me that is
just not long enough okay not to soundtoo high-maintenance but I kind of want
my crispy fried fish to stay crispythroughout the entire eating process and
by the way it's always a nice thing whenthe recipe that provides the best
results also just happens to be theeasiest recipe which is the case here so
with that let's go ahead and get startedwith our batter and that's gonna begin
with one cup of self-rising flour whichis nothing more than regular flour
that's milled with baking powder andsalt and as usual I will tell you how to
mix up your own in the blog post whichis super easy and only takes a second
and then to this flour we're also goingto add about two tablespoons of rice
flour or if you want some other kind ofnon wheat flour okay some people like
cornstarch some people like potatostarch which will also work but I like
the rice flour and then last but notleast I'm also gonna add in a little
extra touch of baking powder and eventhough our self-rising flour already
contains baking powder I do like to addjust a little bit more and that's it
we'll take a whisk and give this a mixuntil we have everything thoroughly
combined and that is now ready to finishoff by stirring in our beer which by the
way I'm going to wait to do until I'mready to use this and because one the
secrets here is keeping the batter ascold as possible what we'll do is
transfer these dry ingredients into thefreezer and we'll leave this in there
until we're ready to mix in our beer andthen once that's set we can move on to
prep our fish and today I'll be usingsome beautiful frozen cod which I gently
defrost it overnight in the fridge andif we are going to use frozen fish or
any fish for that matter we want to makesure to get it as dry as possible okay
so use some paper towels and blot offany excess moisture and then what we'll
do once our fish has been thawed anddried is possibly cut it down the middle
to make to approximately one inch thickstrips sure we could have just fried
this as is but by cutting it not onlywill cook faster but we're also
increasing our surface area which meansthat much more crispy coating and then
what we'll do once that's cut is goahead and dust those in a little bit of
seasoned rice flour befor they go in the batter and what this
is gonna do is absorb any of that lastmoisture on the surface and then once
that's been lightly dusted and we shakeoff the excess what we'll do is transfer
it onto some crinkled up foil and thisis just gonna serve as sort of a drying
rack for that fish okay so that's gonnalet some air circulate underneath and we
will have less chance of a soggy bottomoh by the way I'm just seasoning with a
little bit of salt but if you did wantto sneak in some spices like curry
powder chili powder etc this would be agreat step to do that but anyway we'll
go ahead and dust our fish in the riceflour along with like I said any other
seasonings we want and then because wewant to keep everything cold well
transfer that into the fridge untilwe're ready to use it and that's it once
our fish is prepped in our oils hot wecan pull our dry ingredients either
freezer and finish this batter off bypouring in some beer and for this I
recommend a nice inexpensive lager styleokay I have one imported from Australia
in large blue cans but really any cheaplager is gonna work and that's because
you're more affordable can beers aregonna be nice and light in color and
taste not to mention have a nice highlevel of carbonation and all we're gonna
do is whisk it enough until it's asthick or as thin as we want okay so I'll
start with a nice big splash and I'llgive it a stir and then I'll decide if I
need more which I did and what I'm goingfor is something similar to a nice thick
pancake batter all right keep in mindthe thicker the batter the thicker the
coating once it's fried and sincepersonally I want a nice thin crispy
coating I tend to go for a thinnerbatter and I'm actually gonna grab a
spoon so you can get a good look at whatI'm talking about
okay so make it thicker if you want butI generally shoot for something that's
just gonna coat the fish and by the wayI mentioned keeping everything cold as a
key so if you're not gonna use thisright away pop it in the fridge or keep
it on a bowl of ice but I was starvingand ready to fry so I'm going to
transfer in two pieces of my nice colddry fish into the batter and then once
those are nicely coated we'll go aheadand lift them out letting most but not
all the batter drip off which plane wewill carefully transfer that into some
375 degree oil and by the way I did thatfirst piece wrong because we don't want
the oil splashing towards us so place itin like this so it splashes away from
and then what we'll do after making surethose aren't sticking together let's let
them fry for about three to four minutesor until they're crispy and beautifully
golden brown and there are some thingswe deep-fry that about halfway through
we can kind of tip them and flip themover
but fried fish isn't really one of themso don't worry about trying to turn them
over they can just cook with that sameside down although sometimes to hedge my
bets I will give them a little dunkingfor a few seconds but anyway like I said
we'll let those go for about three orfour minutes or until they look a little
something like thisat which point we'll fish those out and
let those drain for a few seconds onsome paper towel and as you can
hopefully see this recipe really doesproduce a gorgeous piece of fried fish
which we will want to serve immediatelyon top of either some french fries which
people in certain places call chips oron real actual chips and as you can see
I've lined the bowl with some newspaperand a little bit of an homage to actual
fish and chipsspeaking of which because malt vinegar
is often served with the fried fishI actually went with salt and vinegar
potato chips and that's it before I tuckin I went ahead and tucked in a little
bit of tartar sauce in a wedge of lemonwhich is not traditional with regular
fish and chips but is very very verytraditional with Western New York
fish fries which is what I like topretend this is and by the time I did
that it had been about 10 minutes is'scame out of the fryer but it was still
crispy as you'll hear when I bite
oh yeah and what I find amazing withthis recipe is that we've achieved this
level of Chris penis with such anincredibly thin coating I mean it's
barely there in fact this might evenqualify as a low carb recipe oh and by
the way as I was taking this next bite Ithought to myself I'm gonna stop and
take some pictures of the cross-sectionwhich is why you're about to see me
pinch off a jagged piece of the coatingwhich as I was doing I realized would
look weird on camera so just something Iwanted to mention because that would
have kept a few people up wondering whydid he pinch that fish dick and of
course it's probably really obvious butI'll tell you anyway just because I use
Cod for this doesn't mean you have toI mean you are after all the Arthur
Treacher's of what sea creatures thisfeatures and virtually any fish or
seafood will work with this techniquebut anyway I went ahead and finished
that first piece and I went ahead andgrabbed the second and even though it
had been quite a while since this cameout of the fryer it was still just as
crispy as my first bite so I justabsolutely love this formula oh and let
me give you a little tip here whetheryou're gonna use a tartar sauce or some
other sauce you want to go ahead andapply that to each bite
all right don't just slop it all onthere at once otherwise everything is
gonna get soggy all right so the methodwe want to use is the bite sauce white
sauce white saucewhoop sorry it's actually the other way
around it's sauce white sauce whitesauce white and that will help preserve
the Chris penis but anyway that's it myfavorite method for doing beer battered
fish whether you're going to serve yourson regular chips or the British style
potato chips which are actually frenchfries which are really actually Belgian
fries but the point is no matter whatyou serve this on I really do hope you
give it a try soon so head over to foodwhich is calm for all the ingredient
amounts of Martha as usual and as alwaysenjoy
you
you