Traditional Battered Fish

It’s not as easy these days to enjoy freshly cooked piping hot fish and chips ….however this recipe means you don’t have to miss out! This recipe is much cheaper than buying them for take -out.

Ingredients: makes 4 portions

For the battered fish :

Approx.. 500 – 600 g cod or haddock cut into pieces and preferably no thicker than 1 inch at its thickest part. Any thicker and it becomes more difficult to cook the fish through without burning the batter.
110 g self raising flour and a bit extra flour for dusting the fish prior to battering.
1/2 teaspoon salt
150 ml water (sparkling water if you have any but tap water is absolutely fine)
1.5 L vegetable oil for the frying (enough to fill a large saucepan).

Method:

1. Make the batter: just whisk together the flour, salt and water until it is lump free. It should have the consistency of double cream. If you have time set aside in the fridge for 30 minutes minimum. Even better if you have longer.

This is the sort of consistency you are after

Frying:

1. Dry your pieces of fish with kitchen towel.

2. Heat the oil in large saucepan. It is hot enough to cook the fish when you drop a small dot of batter in it and it floats back up to the top. If it is smoking it is too hot!

3. Dust the fish in flour, then batter. Shake off the excess batter drops, then very gently lower into the hot oil pan. Not too quickly or they can stick to the bottom of the pan. Only do 1 -2 at once as overcrowding the pan will lower the temperature of the oil. They should take approximately 5-8 minutes and are ready when golden brown. Fish them out with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen towel.

4. You can keep the cooked fish warm in the oven until ready to serve, but they are better eaten straightaway!

5. Serve these with chips, peas (or mushy peas), salt and malt vinegar. Oven chips are the easy option, but I will post my recipe for crispy and fluffy chips very soon.

6. Enjoy 🙂

7. P.S. The fish oil can be re-used once again and sometimes even twice. Just leave to go cold and filter through kitchen towel back into the bottle for re-use (for fish exclusively) at a later date.