Fish and Chips

So, B/N now has a food truck.  Which is an awesome and wonderful thing.  In a town where if a new chain restaurant opens people will wait in line for hours to get a table, it's nice to see a locally owned place get as much good press as this place does.  The truck is called Two Blokes and a Bus.  These guys have renovated an old British double decker bus into a restaurant on wheels.  One of the owners is a transplanted Brit, so it makes total sense.

One of the dishes they were running over the past several months was the British classic, fish and chips.  Knowing that this dish was coming up on my menu I wanted to give the Blokes' fish and chips a try.  But when I went I had just enough cash to cover the menu price and not knowing if tax was included or not I went with something else. 

I'll be honest, deep fried anything is always a good thing, deep fried fish and potatoes are even better so I knew I was going to love this one from the start.  These days it seems like all I use my nice Le Crueset cast iron pan for is deep frying.  Oh well, Bloomington cardiologists will love me later on in life. 

 You all know what potatoes look like so I didn't take any pictures of the mise.  I cut two potatoes into fries.  My mom will probably be upset with me, but I tend to do this with a knife and not with my fancy schmancy mandoline.  Partly because the mandoline takes some effort to get out of the cabinet, but mostly because even though I've had it for 2 years, I can't figure out how to use anything but the straight blade.  The thing came with four different serrated blades and it is completely counter intuitive on how to attach them to the assembly.  So I use a knife when I want fries.  Besides, knife work like this helps keep me sane at times.

The first step was to par fry the fries.  To do this I heated the oil to about 275 degrees and then dropped the potatoes in.  I let them go until they just started to turn brown around the edges.  Once they were par cooked I pulled them out, salted them and let them cool while I prepped the fish.  Note, turn off the oil at this point, you don't want the culinary equivalent of an IED sitting on your stove.

 The stuff for the fish.  Cornstarch, flour, cayenne, paprika, baking powder, salt and pepper and a british beer, in this case Newcastle.  Oh and the star of the dish, cod.  Cod is certainly a classic but you can use just about any white fish for this, though I wouldn't recommend anything super expensive like Sea Bass, which was the other white fish the store had when I went shopping.

On the side, I mixed the flour, cornstarch, baking powder and beer, and then seasoned the fish with the cayenne, paprika, salt and pepper.

Once the oil had heated up to about 350, I coated the fish in the batter and then dropped them in the oil and let them cook for about 3-4 minutes. 

Once the fish was done the potatoes went into the oil to finish cooking.

This is where the mistake began.  A classic side for fish and chips is mushy peas, nothing wrong with that.  The problem is I didn't even start on this until after everything had gotten done frying.  the ingredients for the peas include, frozen peas, cream, butter, salt and pepper.  The peas cooked in a bit of salted water until tender.

Then the whole mixture went into a blender until it looked like baby food, pretty sure it tasted better though.

Here is the completed heart attack on a plate.  Everything was delicious, I just wish I hadn't stopped to make the peas.  The delay resulted in both the fish and fries cooling off and getting soggy, not the crispy fried deliciousness you'd expect.