Making Fish & Chips (Served With Mushy Peas)

okay today we're going to be making fish and chips and the first step is the potatoes [Music] so i've got some potatoes here this is a variety called vivaldi and we're just going to peel these now you can make chips with the skin on and actually i quite like that but today we're going to go for a more classic chip so we're taking the skin off we're of course losing a little bit of fiber and nutrition that way but so be it okay i'm making this for two people so i'm gonna start off with five potatoes we'll see how it goes so i need to cut these potatoes into chips and i need to think about the size of them and if i make them too thin they'll be just crispy potato if i make them too thick they will be soggy so i'm going to go for a little over a centimeter thick that's just about a centimeter thick yeah just a centimeter squared future shrimp here before we go any further there are three very quick things to say about this video firstly i had a lot of trouble with the light in this video due to autumn evenings drawing in i've done my best to adjust the worst bits for color balance in post but it's far from perfect so bear that in mind especially in relation to the colours of the food nextly this video is about fish and chips which is a national dish here in the uk and a lot of people get really passionate about this and some might feel that i got something or everything wrong i've eaten fish and chips from all over this land and there's very considerable variability especially the chips some like them crunchy some like them thinner or thicker i personally like them exactly as i made them here but what matters when you're cooking for yourself is not how well you adhere to someone else's notional standard but rather whether you end up making what you imagined that you would make at the outset there's lots of room for differences of opinion on this and i would love to hear from you about your own personal preferences in the comments finally why am i making fish and chips hasn't this been done to death by every other cook and chef well maybe so but there's a method to my madness this video is my half of a recipe collab with my friend babatunde in nigeria there are links in the card and description that go to his video where he'll make this british classic and give us his impressions of tasting it okay that's all of the interruptions let's get on with the cooking obviously some of these are going to be thinner because they're made from the rounded edges of the potato but we're kind of going for that thickness so something like that so we can judge that on these potatoes it's kind of about three cuts that way and then yeah probably two cuts on the end pieces and then three cuts on the middle slice okay and we're going to get these straight into cold water in a pan smaller potatoes i think we'll probably just go for one cut that way and two cuts that way the idea here is just to try to end up with fairly consistent pieces of potato that are going to cook at the same rate probably could have done with a slightly larger pan but that will be fine so got those in a pan of cold water and now i'm just going to bring that to the boil and very very carefully parboil this potato okay so i've got that on the heat i'm going to put a lid on that i'm going to go really really careful with this i'll go keep an eye on it because i don't want to overcook this potato or it'll just go to mash so we just got to partly cook this potato and then drain it okay now use a bigger pan than i've used here this is stupid i've the reason i haven't used my bigger pan is i want to keep it dry for the frying we don't want them to lose their firmness but all they do is they just lose that kind of apple-like crispness that they've got on the surface so okay so this is the sound when they're not cooked okay with the point of a knife and we'll have a listen in a minute for the sound of when they are cooked okay i can tell by smell actually that these are starting to cook now i can smell cooked potato and i don't know if you can hear that it's just a duller sound when i scrape it with the point of a knife right so heat off and we drain those and leave them there to dry out and for the steam to leave them so i've got two nice little fillets of haddock you could use cod you could use pollock any kind of whitefish you could use catfish if that's what's available to you so but i'm using haddock today and these have been frozen and thawed so they are going to be a little bit on the wet side so i might just pat them with a paper towel first but while we're waiting for the potatoes let's make the batter so i've got half a cup of corn flour or corn starch you might call that and i'm going to add to that an equal amount of wheat plain wheat flour about half a cup now not giving the actual weights here because really all that matters here is that we get the volumes equal of corn starch and wheat flour because we're going to mix the actual batter pretty much by eye i'm going to put a tiny pinch of turmeric in there just to give it some golden color that is optional but it will just help to make this batter a little bit more golden and i'm just going to have a tiny pinch of salt in there not too much because we will be adding salt at the table so just going to combine those dry ingredients first before we add any liquid this batter contains no egg and that's one of the things that will make it really really crispy and we're going to add beer to this now i'm using a ruby oil here you can kind of use any beer you like here a lot of beer batters use lager i'm just using this it doesn't make a lot of difference because you're not really gonna taste the beer you do a little bit in the batter but not as much as people might imagine so i'm just gonna add a bit of beer and then start making a batter and this is the point where we're just to play it by ear keep combining the ingredients until we end up with something that looks about like what we want and i'll show you the consistency we're trying to get to so at the moment it's far too claggy but the trick is not to add too much liquid because we want quite a sticky batter it's a little bit on the heavy side so just a bit more liquid and that's good so we've got a batter that kind of you can pick it up with a fork but it will run through the fork because it's got cornstarch in there when you stir it it feels thicker than it actually will be because of that whole non-newtonian thing that cornstarch does but there we go so we've got a batter that's kind of semi-liquid that's about right okay rest of that beer i'll have that later we're going to leave that to stand for a moment because the starches in there will develop a little bit in that batter so the chips are almost ready to go in the oil now so just show you what i've got here so these chips are kind of a little bit bendy but they're still quite firm and if you scrape them with your fingernail you do find that they're a little bit doughy on the surface but they're not falling apart so i'm just going to give those a little shake in case any bits of them are wet or anything like that and give them a chance to be exposed to the air to dry out because we don't want to put water into hot fat okay frying in vegetable oil some people prefer to fry in beef tallow or lard but i'm gonna be frying a vegetable oil i'm gonna fill that pan no more than half full and we'll put that on the heat so i saved a little bit of the potato peel we can use that for testing the oil just to see if it's up to temperature no it's definitely not yet although it is coming up to temperature you can see a little bit of bubbling when i put that in there but not quite enough it's going to be a little while longer just a minute or two longer to get up to temperature okay and we'll just test that again yeah i'd say we're there now because that's almost immediately bubbling the moment we put it in the fat so not going to put all of my chips in at once i'm going to do these in maybe three batches so carefully pop the chips into the oil and just move them around to stop them sticking as soon as they're in there and that looks about right in terms of the amount of bubbling and activity we should see and we'll cook those chips until they're crispy and golden so while those chips are cooking let's just talk about other things we're going to have with it i'm having mushy peas with my fish and chips because i really like mushy peas these are maro fat peas so they're kind of really mealy starchy pea that's been cooked and partly mashed to make what we call mushy peas and it's really delicious you can buy tins of mara fat peas that have not been mashed and some people like them that way i think jenny's gonna have fresh garden peas with hers that's just her preference okay so i think i'm gonna call those done so out they come and onto some kitchen paper towel to drain just to drain off any excess fat they smell great nice and golden and in with the next flash so let's just have a closer look at those so they've gone golden but not in any way burnt and well they're too hot to handle at the moment but when we have a look at them in a minute we're going to see that they're fluffy and cooked inside so while this last batch of chips is cooking let's go and get the fish ready before we do the fish let's just have a quick look at one of these chips so crispy and kind of rustling on the outside and when we open up inside fluffy and flowery in the middle let's have a taste it's really too hot to eat ah yeah that's good so the fish i'm just gonna pat it dry a little bit with a bit of kitchen paper towel and then i'm just going to give it a little dust with flour this is really just to remove any surface wetness so that the batter can stick to it properly just dusted those fillets of fish with flour lovely and we're going to drop them into the batter like that leave them there for a moment and then flip them over so to avoid getting my hands in a mess i'm going to use tongs for this but we're just going to move that fish around in the batter until it's got a good even coating and we'll have a look at these mushy peas as well weird stuff in a can there is a weird stuff in a can episode about mushy peas so linking this card here no pull tap on the can i guess we'll have to use a can opener then and that's what mushy peas look like ew gross i know so i'm just going to put them on a back burner of the stove and give them a little warm through now the really critical part the fish so straight out the batter try and get rid of any little tails of batter and straight into the hot oil ideally that should float up second one straight out the batter into the hot oil and we're just going to hold it there so it doesn't stick to the bottom too much really i think my pan here is a bit too shallow but we'll see i think they got away with that okay i think that's done so let's have a look look at that and that sound the oil is making means it's a little bit on the hot side so there we go two very very nice crispy battered fillets of havoc right let's get this served up so one of the fillets is slightly nicer looking then yeah that's over give jenny the neater one and a bunch of chips so fish and chips jenny's got green peas i've got really green peas mushy peas i do love mushy peas and then just have a little dash of vinegar on the chips a bit of salt a bit of pepper so the all-important taste test so the fish the batter is crisp the fish inside is flaky and moist but fully cooked let's have a taste of that happy with that the chips soft and fluffy on the inside and still just a little bit crisp on the outside that's a proper chip shop chip i would say would you reckon jenny yeah nailed it yeah it's nice almost forgot about my beer now one thing i really like with chips now you're gonna think this is carnage because it's carbs on carbs but i really like to make a chip buddy and for that we need white bread a generous spread of butter and then we'll just line up some chips in there and yet this is carbs on carbs but you know once in a while one coating and if it does you'll die happy let's give that that a taste so there we go that's homemade fish and chips with mushy peas kind of authentic beer battered haddock and a chip butty with salt and vinegar i hope that was interesting thanks for watching and i hope to see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: Atomic Shrimp

Views: 230,019

Keywords: fish and chips, food, fish, potatoes, salt and vinegar, recipe, cooking, eating, kitchen, dining, takeaway

Id: cti_Jds3zxU

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020