Best fish batters

[21TonyK]

I normally just go with plain flour, water, pinch of bicarb, salt, white pepper and a tiny pinch of turmeric for colour.

Any other suggestions that don't involve half a bottle of vodka etc?

[dazco]

The cheap lager or bitter from supermarkets. They usually are about 2% and cost 25 p a tin but are only sold in 4's.

You can use any beer of course but we found no difference between expensive and cheap

[thebraketester]

I like fish deep fried in panko.

[anonymous-user]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

tempora batter made with decent lager is good as well. tempora works well with fish.

[Badvok]

thebraketester said:

I like fish deep fried in panko.

I'm not a fan and personally I feel there are certain people who rave about it just because it's trendy right now. I suspect it wouldnt be as popular if it was just called 'chunky breadcrumb'

Batter all day long

[Gandahar]

21TonyK said:

I normally just go with plain flour, water, pinch of bicarb, salt, white pepper and a tiny pinch of turmeric for colour.

Any other suggestions that don't involve half a bottle of vodka etc?

To be honest I think you could go with the first two ingredients .. the rest is up to how well you get the liquids to solids right and and how well you cook it.

How well you cook it depends on

1. Initial temperature and end temperature depending on how big a bit of fish you are frying
2. How much oil you have, this is tied into 1 above, more than 3 litres of oil hides temp fluctuations
3. Make sure your oil is not too old, old oil absorbs a lot of st over time including water

There is so much stuff about beer batters but can I ever taste the difference or have a crispier bite? No, just marketing. The vodka batter does make it more crispy from my experiments, actually too crispy and I rather thought I would have drunk it. Go figure.

There's another side to the actual batter of course. Which is sorting your fish before you put it on. You must

a) Pat it dry with kitchen cloth
b) coat it in normal flour
c) let it "dry out" in the fridge for 30 mins

then you are ready for your batter to be dipped in the pre-prepped fish

Nowadays I prefer a 50 /50 corn flower / plain flower with water. Consistency here is more important than any other ingredients you want to toss in. You need to be thinking how thick you want that batter to be, draining off to the right amount is also more important at this stage compared to this that or the other.

It's more the chef rather than the ingredients here; when was it not the case with a simple dish?



Enjoy

[evilmunkey]

As above but i prefer frying in beef dripping. realy adds to the flavour and tastes like a yorkshire chippy batter.