Cooking battered fish

[Gandahar]

I've had this long held belief that you do not need one of the following to make crispy batter for fish

Beer
Vodka
Ice cold water
Sparkling water
Ice cold sparkling water with vodka and beer.

Instead you just need self raising flour and tap water at room temperature and just need to know how to mix it in the right quantities and know how to cook it. Ok, if you want to go all Japanese then feel free to be all oriental with cornflour and not self raising.

Trick to good crisp batter is not the mixture but how thick you make it. Make it runny and then drain most off. Also you need to get your thickness of fish right. Too thin and it will be all batter, too thick and it will not cook through before the batter goes too brown.

Dry the fish in kitchen towel then coat with flour. Use a lot of oil, a 4-6 litre deep fryer is fine, start off at 170C and as soon as you put the fish in raise to 180C to compete against the temp drop off from the fish being immersed. 5 to 7 minutes is then needed, I prefer 5 minutes as I like the fish slightly under. The batter is not as brown but still crisp.

The main ingredient is the fish not the batter, something restaurants cannot see past nowadays it seems. Sadly I cannot get fresh fish off the boat like the good old days so it will always be not quite the same.





Imagine the above with chips, mushy peas, 2 slices of buttered white bread and a cup of tea. Magic.

[Jer_1974]

Looks good just the right thickness of batter. Do you have a deep fat fryer built into your shed?

[redtwin]

All those words about the making of and the importance of having batter with the correct consistency and not one picture of the batter or how a well battered fish should look before frying.

End product looked lovely though.

[tenpenceshort]

And no mention of the type of oil beef dripping.

[Don]

My dear old Mum passed away with a pile of fish in her freezer. All in good condition. So I now have a large bag of cod fillets.

My Mrs doesn't eat fish

But this is what I intend to do with them. She can have home made battered sausages (her usual chip shop order) instead...

[mattdaniels]

redtwin said:

End product looked lovely though.

Agreed. Looked very nice. Worth pointing out you don't need a DFF either, you can just about get away with a deep saucepan which is how I fried this:

Fish n Chips by Matt_Daniels, on Flickr