Rawlston Makes Fish And Chips

[oil bubbles]

Taking the first one out. It's still cooking.

I'm ready to eat that thing. Oo wee!

[upbeat funky music]

Fish and chips, I wasn't allowed to eat it

'cause I was raised vegetarian.

I used to have seitan and chips,

which was just the worst thing ever

in the history of anything.

[upbeat soulful music]

I'm using Yukon golds

because there less starch in this potato.

It will allow it to get a little more crispy

and not brown as much.

The sugars are not gonna oxidize.

So with the potato, you wanna get a flat end.

It'll help you to manage it better.

[knife hits chopping block] [upbeat funky music]

We're going to put this into cold oil,

cook it for maybe about a good seven or eight minutes.

So as it's coming up to temp, it's technically blanching.

Then you let it cool a little bit,

and then you'll return it to the oil,

and then it'll get crispy, like a twice cooked potato.

[upbeat music]

A beer batter.

It's really just a batter where the liquid

is actually a beer.

It promotes the color and also flavor, sweetness,

and I usually add a little curry to it.

Curry gives it color and flavor.

For me, fish and chips when I think of it,

there's a little bit of curry on there.

And I to sift everything to make it more uniform,

sift it all together.

For me, a good batter has to do with is it light,

crispy, crunchy, flavorful?

Even the color.

And then salt, cayenne, and then the curry.

And then we're gonna be using a lager

from Transmitter Brewery.

I'm not a beer drinker for real, but I love this beer.

This beer, it's really crispy, fresh.

Any beer works. The color, look at that color, right?

That's gonna be amazing. Oh, what am I doing? [laughs]

Look at the color of that.

Yeah, that's good.

I'm gonna strain the batter just

to make sure that they're on any lumps.

The consistency is that you want it

to hug the whisk a little bit, hug then let go.

I'm gonna cover and refrigerate.

[upbeat funky music]

For fish and chips, we will use cod.

You can use any fish for the fish and chips,

but we do bacalao, or we call it cod fish

or salted cod in the islands.

That's our thing, breakfast, lunch, dinner.

First, we're going to pat it dry.

It helps the batter to adhere better to the fish.

So this is about a pound and a half.

Really and truly, you just need to get even strips just

to have 'em cook evenly, right?

There's nothing sadder than when I bite into it

and the batter is more flavorful than the fish.

I wanna taste the seasoning all the way through.

And then so we do some black pepper here, the cayenne.

We have the dry hand and the wet hand for me.

With the dry hand, you can gauge how much you're putting.

Usually if your hand is wet,

then you have the seasoning adhering to your fingers,

so you can't really tell how much you're really putting

on the fish.

[upbeat bright music]

And we're gonna check on those fries.

You see how they're getting this color?

This is the color we want, right? These are chips.

The reason why they chips, not a lot of thought goes

into the whole cutting of 'em.

If they're fries, there's a lot more care, I guess.

You can't call a crinkly fry a chip, right?

And we're almost there.

Yeah, I think they're ready to go

'cause then we're gonna bring them back up to temp again.

And we're not gonna season them now

'cause we're gonna put them back in just to bring them up

to temp once we're finished frying the fish.

You could even go a little darker if you wanted to,

but we going for this color.

They're still a little soft,

but they gonna crisp up in a few.

[upbeat thumping music]

So usually, with fish and chips, there's a lemon wedge,

but for me, I love lemon sauce.

It's just my go to.

So we're going to do about 1/3 of a cup of lemon juice.

This will just be drizzled on the fried fish at the end.

It is not one of those things that you can have on its own.

I think it pours.

See, I'm not used to the fancy stuff like this.

Look at that. And then the sugar and then nutmeg.

Usually I use mace. It's a membrane.

It's a red membrane that's outside of the nutmeg, right?

I switched to nutmeg because it's more accessible.

Basically, we're looking for this to reduce by half.

That's when it's done.

Right now, the aroma is absolutely amazing.

I wish you can smell it.

You don't need to go any further. That's it.

And then we can leave it open

and put it in the fridge again.

It'll cool down.

[upbeat soulful music]

This is a vegan mayo that has totally taken over my life.

I use some silken tofu.

Usually, someone would add some creme fraiche or something.

I don't do dairy like that, so tofu,

it's same type of texture.

It's gonna give some body to this thing.

For me, what makes it good has to do

with a little bit of texture, richness from the mayo,

a balance of acidity, some kind of sweetness,

and also, the juice from the capers is really good,

so I use it as well.

And then I kinda smash 'em.

So capers gives you the same type of something pickled,

something a little briny.

You could put as much or as little as you want, right?

[soft upbeat music]

Some lemon, salt, and some pepper.

I think we're there.

So all the flavors are gonna meld together.

[upbeat bright soulful music]

we wanna get up to about 350ish.

If it gets too hot, then your batter

will just be blown off of the fish, right?

And it'll end up looking like it's caught

in the wind somewhere.

Put it in. You just wanna coat it, really.

And the beer batter, of course, it's more airy

because of the carbonation of the beer.

It should cook quicker that way.

It leaves the meat of the fish still tender and juicy.

So this is the same oil from the fries,

from the chips, actually,

and you can also do shallow frying,

which means you can do half of this amount of oil,

and you can do about three and a half

to four minutes each side.

Don't crowd the pan, of course. They will stick together.

[oil bubbles]

Those look good.

There's that carry over cooking, right?

So once you take it out, even when it's resting,

the temperature still goes up.

Taking the first one out. It's still cooking.

I'm ready to eat that thing. Oo wee!

This is what you use when you're baking a cake

to see if it's done.

You know how you stick the fork in or something?

Cake tester is less invasive.

Stick it into the protein, and then you feel if it's warm,

then it's ready to go.

Looks really good. Just take it out.

[upbeat funky music]

I need to get this oil up to my 360 again

'cause we're gonna have a flash them

in here to get them a little crisper.

And so you can have hot fish,

hot fries all from the same pan.

[oil bubbles]

Yeah, so now yeah, they're ready.

Traditionally, you only put salt on there.

And again, I got in trouble.

Chef Alon in culinary school, he said to me,

Who put black pepper on the fries?

It was class stopped, music stopped. He was pissed.

Salt, some salt on the fish.

We have our tartar sauce.

Put with the fries first, the chips first.

I'm happy with these.

And then this is the sauce, right?

[upbeat funky music]

That's it. That's our fish and chips there.

Of course, I went for the fish first.

Mm.

I love that.

The flavor of the curry,

the texture of the fish is perfectly cooked,

and just something, a little hint of when you taste,

like, What is that, right?

I call that a little give a damn.

If you just went the extra mile, right?

The fries, pretty good. It's so tender.

Let me try it with this sauce here.

Mm.

It's all about seasoning in layers, right?

You season the fish, you season the batter,

and you taste all those layers.

I really like it.

[bright funky music]

The only thing that's missing from here is that beer.