How Chef Ed Szymanski Perfected Fish & Chips at NYC’s Dame — Eater New Guard

i don't want to be arrogant enough to say it's better than fish and chips you can find in the uk because there are a lot of people who disagree with that and at me for that but i'm proud of the version of fish and chips we've created here and i think it stands up to the test so i start my day at eight o'clock get to the restaurant unlock everything open up the doors home sweetheart smells like fried fish still that's that's our life patricia is my partner in business and life which i i think is the cutest way of saying that i'm like the window dressing if you will but she's like the backbone to the restaurant all right let's make some fish and chips hello top of the morning sherry hey good morning the fish delivery sherry from libra and sons who drops it off awesome fish monger to work with she'll bring whatever she has that day that's great especially now she knows her recipe testing because we can work with anything it is heavy that's my workout for the day huh you got your live lobster glitten point oysters you got a hate thank you sherry thank you we're gonna make you famous oh yeah for our fish and chips we use hake which is a local flaky white fish super delicious a lot of the cod you get in the east coast of the us comes from iceland which is a long way away and they don't swim like they get caught in iceland and put on a boat so the hake is a little more local we go through a lot of this stuff like 150 pounds on the two days we do the fish and chips on the weekends i think the difference between hake and cod is that hicks a little flakier and a little richer and it's fleshed like cod can be a little milder which is great for some preparations like if you were ceviche or something but i think for frying cake holds up a little better if you're adding something to the deep fryer you don't really want it to be oily to begin with you could use oilier fish to do visual chips if you want like there's really no rules you could do pretty much anything but it works out a lot better the texture's a lot better with like a flakier leaner whitefish i think the fish and chips thing came about like almost as an accident because that was the fish and chips was the real pandemic pivot we've spent the last what was meant to be like you know two three week pop-up we didn't really know how long it would be we started last june 2020 has now turned into like a 10-month gig we didn't think we'd be selling hundreds of pounds of fish a week we thought we'd be doing like three or four orders every hour kind of thing the trick with uh pin boning you use like commercial pliers i will probably get eight orders of fish out of this side and then eight orders out of the other side too so a total of 16 per fish but i mean it really depends on the size of the height zest of a lemon to give it like some aromatic quality and then the mix of salt and sugar you like to be quite generous with we're gonna rinse it off before we fry the fish it's just you know there to draw out some of the moisture in the flesh and just make sure it's it's all in the batter is a version of heston blumenthal's recipe i think every seafood chef everyone who makes fish and chips seriously agrees that his rep powder recipe is the best this is ap flour goes in we use sweet potato starch ap flour alone will not be as crispy the rice flour makes it really crispy rice flour has a lower moisture content and less gluten well basically none put baking powder in beer important that it's cold and vodka a we make the batter to order so every time someone orders fish chips you make a new batch of batter because you don't really want to have your fish swimming in hot fry oil you know you want it to be steaming inside the crispy batter and that's like a big part of tempura cooking in japan like you don't cook the ingredient you cook the batter and the ingredient will like poach very gently inside all right and it's got to stay cold like the flowers starts cold the vodkas room temperature but the beer is cold so the temperature difference when it hits the fryer just it just speeds up the cooking process so it's much much firmer than it was when it was fresh which we want a nice firm piece a fish goes straight in the batter like no dredge on it so you just go straight in leaves it lightly you can see how like frosty and bubbly the batter is it's very important and at 375 it's got to be hot all right so the batter is like almost like souffle [Music] it's best not to disturb it so much also like cook the fries simultaneously you test it with a meat thermometer our busiest days we do upwards of 100 fish and chips a day which in those tiny little deep fries is quite a challenge because you fit like two pieces of fish in there at a time which can be pretty tough we spent a lot of time trying to make this crispy right we'll be ashamed to ruin it at the last minute but we still want to give it the aroma and flavor of the more vinegar so we use a spray bottle hey people in england don't eat that fish and chips that much like it's not a common part of your diet in the uk so i thought there's no way it's going to be popular in america like and their response was just overwhelming straight off the bat [Music] so most of my cooking to this point has been with me and now i'm opening my first restaurant as the owner and we've decided to cook with seafood so i'm learning a lot as we go along so if i get in early in the morning i can do a bit of recipe development before we open for service which is really great we're gonna test the dish today with these whole lobsters for two it was it's meant to be indulged in this crab dish but apparently dungeons crabs don't exist anymore oh they're just too expensive we're going to split them off devil the tails bib out of the claws and make a catchery out of the knuckles so one lobster three techniques so with the lobsters we're gonna split them alive down the head and then through the tail twist the tail off [Music] all right we're gonna prepare the chili butter sauce for the lobster a little dijon mustard this is a one of the magic ingredients like the fermented shrimp and chili paste you get this like hong kong supermarket adds a lot of umami and depth to it a little bit of smoked paprika too just like you have some smokiness in the sauce but also in the in the lobster too from being on the grill and then some silk chili all right grill's hot so we'll grill the tails we cook them shell side down to protect the flesh because it's quite a delicate meat we don't want to overcook it so you do it on the shell side it'll add a lot of smoke to the lobster but it will cook the flesh quite gently so it's going to take a while whereas if we cooked it the other way it would be like cooked instantly you wouldn't really have any flavor and it would become rubbery real quick it's a little safer this stuff is like liquid gold it's like butter and lobster juice is accumulating in the head these are nearly done we're going to finish them in the oven just so we can put a lot of butter on them we can blanch these claws the floors come out and into ice water so we're going to deep fry like an amazing disher wu's wonton king where they take a whole dungeness crab deep fry the whole thing has a shell on but you like bite through the shell and get the crispy bits and then you like suck out the meat that's a lot of the inspiration for this dish is that dish in that restaurant and we'll just crack these with the back of the knife see it's still raw on the inside but like approaching cooked take up a bit of the shell so the customer has like an easy time pulling it out once it's been fried and the chloramine is going to go into the kejeri so whereas you would normally mix in like smoked haddock kedgeree is an anglo-indian rice dish normally made with rice curry powder hard-boiled eggs and smoked haddock so we cooked the rice already like steam it with curry powder a little saffron and some bay leaves too and then season it and then in one of these fancy copper parts we'll take the heads out and put that in the kedgeree and it's homily that'll give it a little richness and that's another part of the animal we wouldn't be using otherwise oh my goodness i got a lobster everywhere we and i have like this joke like if one of us does something silly or like look at each other and be like don't tell the chef because like there isn't really one here i mean we both have to do everything this is doggo my heart and soul so he's like the sous chef line cook porter dishwasher head chef delivery driver like pretty much everything so there's really the the drink the straw that stirs the drink kind of thing all right lobsters coming out that's nice and cool let that rest the balls are done finish the rice a real privilege to be able to use another kitchen for a few months whilst we build out our permanent space next door because often times you take over your new space and you don't have your kitchen ready until a week or two before you open i mean you don't have the time to do that development so i feel really lucky try some hard to go wrong yeah that actually came out pretty well like a lot of times the first thing you make is pretty crap that looks alright like we might end up taking the shell entirely off the claws to make it even easier for the customer to eat but one animal used three different ways there are a lot of these seafood restaurants that serve basically sushi or just like cut up raw stuff and then it's not good like if you want sushi go to an amakase place or go to like a real sushi restaurant lobster rolls in new york not great so we don't really we're not gonna cook like the staples of seafood cooker it's gonna be i hope to bring a more interesting perspective i get bored easily so this is the perfect plate for me with all the different all the different textures [Music] all right so the monkfish this is another one i've never tried before so i have no idea how it's going to come out but i think it sounds good on paper today it's going to be three techniques on the kebab but going forward for the restaurant i think five if we can source some more monkfish for it so these are monkfish tails uh we got these from viking village and barnacult lights unfortunately a lot of the fishermen discard the heads at sea because you have weight quotas what you can catch the heads of weight that you can't really sell for meat um so they toss them overboard that's something we're trying to change i'm going to take the monkfish livers and soak them in salted water to remove some of the blood and some of the cinnamon before we prep them let them sit for an hour or so looking good nice and fresh firm you want some of this some of these bloody spots too it shows it's it's recently killed and not you know decaying and rotten one of the reasons i like monkfish so much is its texture it's a very firm fish people i think dismissively call it a poor man's lobster but it has a more unique texture than lobster does it's much firmer and it holds up really well to grilling and i want to be the kind of seafood restaurant where you know the grill is a central part of the kitchen and we'll make a meatball i'm going to put the tail an equal quantity of a liver a little more meat to it because it's a little loose i don't want it to fall apart whilst we're cooking it [Applause] okay that's a good texture for a meatball chives and parsley and season it up here too we want it to be airy and like moussey i think with seafood more than anything else you have to really be on top of the technique you're using to cook it in order to make it delicious on the plate there are a lot of fish that are much better serve raw there are some that are better grilled some poached very gently some fish you can deep fry like you would not want to put mackerel in the deep fryer and you do not want to serve uh hay craw all right so you can see with these like what looked like a very soft and like loose batter has now formed this like a nice squidgy little meatball i think probably use an ice cream scooper to get like the perfectly round shape but this is really more just to see whether the flavors work so excited [Music] we're going to cut our nuggets we're going to season them and then poach them in a in an oil that we've infused with garlic and long peppercorns so this is the the whole monkfish kebab so we've made a meatball from the liver put the poached tail on the skewer it's just been on the grill to warm through you know grill and smoke and whole animal utilization like that's what we're about so that should be that might be on the menu when we open six weeks from now we'll see we've got six weeks to make it perfect [Music] this this is the open kitchen this is like this is where i'm gonna be cooking for you guys i can't wait for it to open i can't wait every day is like a new a new thing comes together and it's like the final final month final five weeks and there's a lot to do but we've come a long way the reason me and patricia went out on our own and don't work for other people now is because we wanted the final say in the decisions we put our lives like sweat and blood and tears and everything gross that you put into work like we did we do that like at other restaurants and now this one and it's you know we want to be able to call something our own [Music] we open the kitchen for service at 12 p.m that's when i start portioning the hake if i'm surviving and managed to to get there in time and we'll cut anywhere from 50 to 100 orders to start the service and go along as we need pandemic has left a lot of chefs untethered and that's allowed pop-ups and people like us to really blossom and start cooking their own food as we come into opening our first restaurant as old as being patricia like the pressure is on it was important to us when we open our first business that we want to narrow that pay gap between the back and the front of house it's part of who we want to be as restauranters because like we own this restaurant we have the freedom to make these decisions you know we're going to use our privilege and our position to restaurant owners to help people more than just you know outside the four walls of the restaurant our mission as restaurateurs is to give back to our community in more meaningful ways than just cooking them [Music] dinner

Channel: Eater

Views: 3,486,856

Keywords: fish & chips, fish & chips recipe, best fish & chips, fish and chips, best fish and chips, fish and chips recipe, how to make fish and chips, the best fish & chips, make fish & chips, the best fish and chips, british food, perfect fish and chips, fried fish, fish and chips batter, the very best fish and chips, beer battered fish, Dame NYC, Best restaurants nyc, best restaurants nyc 2021, British food nyc, British restaurants nyc, seafood, eater, eater.com, eater new guard

Id: JgA6GWAtIAo

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021