Heston's Perfect Fish and Chips recipe- BBC

this is our winning fish it's a beautiful turbot I dearly try and find a fishmonger you can put your trust in and always buy your fish hole it's the best guarantee of freshness there's a few things to look for when choosing fresh fish first go to the gills here and they should be pink and clean and that's wonderful and the eyes the eyes should be glistening shiny they shouldn't be sunken glazed over and the skin well it should have a nice resistance you can see here there's a lovely Sheen to it so now we need to fill it the fish and to do this there's a central bone that runs down here we're going to do is run the knife along that bone first I'm left-handed so I might be doing it differently to some of you but working from the tail up you can feel two bones that come out from the central bone just get a knife running along there and just work it slide it along the bone to the outside of the fill it and you'll fill the fill it coming away nice and easily again with this just be very gentle you've taken all the care to choose this fish be very careful when you fill it again I'm leaving the skin on because I like the flavor and the texture of the skin but if you want to just just remove it after you've taken the finish off yeah there's a beautiful Philip of turbot you can see here the thickness in the flesh this is really important if we're going to keep all that moisture and juiciness inside our fish my tests reveal the Erin victory is the best variety for making chips if you can't get those go for Mary's Piper now I'm cutting the potatoes into fairly regular sized chips because that makes for an interesting range of textures the only important thing here is don't cut them too thick if you do there'll be too much moisture in the inside of the potato inside of the chip and what that'll do is it'll render the chips soggy so once you cut the chips place them in a bowl of water and just leave them under the tap for about five minutes just until the water becomes clear washing out some of the starch I've devised this recipe to make the fluffiest krispies chips imaginable it's a three-stage process for the first step after the potatoes have been washed place them in a pan of lightly salted water and cook them on simmering now they'll take between 10 and 20 minutes depending on the potato and what we're looking for here is we want the potato to be as close as possible to breaking up be very careful though if it's a few seconds too long and you're going to end up with potato soup these are just about ready if I can show you this you'll see the outside of the potato it's all broken up all those crags and cracks will absorb the oil and make the outside of the chip wonderfully crisp so at this point we need to drain them I've got here a cake rack set over a tray just place them on the rack and they stood a lot of steam inside that chip a lot of moisture we want to get rid of some of that we do that by using the fridge now the air in here is very dry and put this in here for about 30 minutes so here's something that have been in for about a half an hour or so you can see you've got a wonderful rough surface what's happening is while the potatoes cool down the starch in there is actually recrystallizes foamed up the chip and that'll mean that we're gonna have a wonderful crust so now for step 2 of the three-stage process the first frying in here are chips that are dried in the fridge they all set to 130 degrees centigrade they've been in here for about five minutes and they're just about ready and what we're looking for is the outside of each chip is just beginning to color but no more than that at this stage we dry them out once more it's still a little bit too much moisture inside each chip if we don't get rid of that these chips are still going to become a bit soggy so I'm throwing them back on the cake rack and repeat the process again putting them in the fridge leaving them to dry out a little bit further and once that's done you can place them in a sill container and leave them until you're ready for the third stage the final frame well after a lot of head-scratching we managed to crack the recipe for the batter what you need is one of these our soda siphon use for making carbonated drinks we're gonna use it to put more bubbles in the batter so to make the batter recipe in here I've got flour and rice flour I'm gonna add to that some honey now this will just help the color of the batter and then vodka then finally I'm gonna add the beer it's important to open this last minute because you want to keep as much gas and here as possible so we're gonna make the batter even lighter mix everything together again it's important to keep the bubbles don't be too worried if you've got some lumps still in here if anything that says you're gonna make for more interesting texture now I need to fill the siphon okay you can see these lumps going in those lumps are gonna give us really a wonderful little nuggets of crisp batter to charge the siphon a canister co2 here and I'm gonna do that three times Skip's and you get as much carbon dioxide in here as possible so when this is fully charged it needs to go in the fridge and the reason for this is carbon dioxide is much more soluble in cold liquid so we're calling the batter down we're gonna get more gas more bubbles that make for a crisper lighter batter so now tar chips this is the third and final stage for our chips after the second drawing in the fridge that need to be fried one more time now these have been in here for three minutes at 190 degrees centigrade another four five minutes and they'll be ready on to the fish I've got in here a pan of all amuse a pan lot of fryer for two reasons one because the size of it that's secondly and more importantly we need to cook this batter really quickly most fryers are not very accurate and reliable at higher temperatures so I've got a probe it's very important to make sure you know the temperature we're looking for 220 I'm using the pro to make sure the oil doesn't get too hot the data just empty this out into the bowl you can see all the bubbles the reason for coating the fish and seasoned flour is to make sure that the batter sticks otherwise it's gonna fall off into the batter and straight into the oil here's something I picked up from the tempura restaurant just taking a spatula and drizzling that batter on top of the fish and you're gonna get these wonderful shards of really light fish batter there these tips are now ready this batter is so crispy looks fantastic and the chips now I just want to have a look at the fish that is perfect

Channel: BBC Studios

Views: 3,334,582

Keywords: BBC, Good Food, Easy, Dinner, Idea, Recipe, Heston Blumenthal, Michelin, Chef, Free, Meal, Cook, Video

Id: Zr3Rrzrv8vU

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2010