To Batter or not to Batter

Indeed do – Batter in my family is a food group.

They are many intricate and simple options for batter both homemade and store bought.

Given it was a reasonably good Auckland day (it only rained once) I figured it was a good day to try out some batter recipes and frying techniques.

Depending who you ask the general consensus is that the battered fried fish originated in Portugal circa the 15th century. There is a religious tone to the recipe, cooking was not allowed on the Jewish Sabbath so these families would coat their fish in corn or wheat flour and then fry the fish. The batter preserved the fish and some of the flavour so it could be eaten cold the next day.

Jewish immigrants to England took this culinary masterpiece to England in the late 1700’s. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens references the fried fish warehouses in 1837. From there Ngapuhi took it to the world and beyond…..

Having spent some of my misspent youth working part-time in a fish’n chip shop I guess I learnt something.

Ingredients:

Fresh Fish Fillets

Batter:  A Good Billy basic batter is 2/3 self-raising flour one third rice flour mix and then add cold soda water or cold beer to get to a nice wet sticky runny but not sloppy consistency.

The addition of Rice flour helps add to the crunch of final product or instead of rice flour use cornflour or potato flour.

Method:

Cooking medium. I will always go tallow based and 170C

Always coat your portions in cornflour or similar as a binder to help batter adhere.

If cutting fillets or portions I will always try and cut to similar size.

When making batter, don’t over beat it as you want to keep the bubbles in the mix. Try folding the batter mix together instead.

Lay fish into oil away from you so it does splash back

Turn the fish every minute to balance off cooking

Never let the fish “spit” as if it does it is time to remove and dry. The spit is the water in fish fillet converting to steam, and then the steam under pressure breaks free of the batter envelope. Once steam is released, the oil will look to enter the envelope hence you can get greasy tasting fish. Nature doesn’t like a vacuum.

Enjoy!

Kia a nui te kai