Always wanted to make your own fish and chips? Same here. Any excuse to grab a bottle of beer too. Get your English on!
As a representative of England (I work with foreign students) I like to try to discourage them from fish and chips on the beach because it's bland and it's hard to find a good chippie - Wolfies aside. You can see how English food got its bad rep when you look at things like sausage and mash (just think school dinners back in the day). Although saying that, when I picture sausage and mash it's the good version made with decent sausages and a chunky mash with loads of black pepper and butter! I don't know what English food is that bad... What do you think?
Perhaps I've got more of a new appreciation for it in the last couple of years hosting International food nights and bringing some kind of British food to try to sway their opinion into believing English food can be good, it's just done badly in some restaurants and some homes but it's mostly simple food isn't it? Your meat and two veg etc.
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| Coming soon - mini Cornish pasties |
Anyway, living by the sea means there is no shortage of fish and chips on offer and it's about £8 now (remember when it was more like £5?) We had a chip van in Cornwall that used to drive round all the streets and it had a very old weird lechy man who was most defo a paedo and an equally weird woman who was SO Cornish - she called you 'My cock' or 'My cocker' - no joke.
Have you ever made your own? It's pretty straight forward. I just grabbed a recipe off Pinterest and then twisted it a little so here goes:
Ingredients
One cup of plain flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1.25 cups of light beer - I used Heineken because it's my fave lager - Make sure you go for bottled because it will be fizzier than canned and fizzy = better batter.
Fish! I used cod but if you do make sure it's responsibly sourced etc.
Chips! I used two small sweet potatoes
Oil for deep-frying. I used extra virgin olive oil but it's up to you, I get that it's expenny.
Good. Ready? This whole thing takes around 20 minutes BTW
Pre-heat that oven to 200 degrees.
Chop your sweet potato into chips.
Then coat in olive oil and season on a tray and bang them in for around 20 mins
Get your fish and flour it a bit
Make your batter by mixing the flour, baking powder, beer and a little salt and pepper
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On the hob, heat a deep pan with loads of oil in it.
BE CAREFUL! I actually started a fire doing this as I heated the oil with a lid on for aaages thinking it needed to get SUPER hot, which it does but not THAT hot and then when I took the lid off the whole thing fucking ignited, it was shit scary and I had to quickly run and put the camera down (priorities) and google how to extinguish an oil fire! Turns out you just cut off the oxygen supply so I slipped the lid back on using an oven glove and put it outside (how handy having a garden now!) Scary though so be careful please. The second time round (such a waste of oil!) I left the lid off and just heated it slowly for about 4 minutes.
You can test when the oil is hot enough by dropping a little bit of batter in it. If it fizzes and pops, it's ready.
Dip your fish in the batter and then drop it carefully into the oil and fry for about 6-8 minutes or until it's nicely golden :)
Enjoy with lots of lemon wedges and more beer! Oh and you can find the recipe for the mayonnaise pictured here
Let me know how you get on and what you think in the comments below!
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