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Cod, Chips, Carrots, Cheese, and Candy Bars - all fried in Canola oil

A while back, when we still watched cable TV, the Food Network was a staple for us.  Jamie Oliver had a show called the Naked Chef, or something like that, and he did a simple fish and chips show one time.  Now, I love real fish and chips.  And I found that I especially love cod when cooked this way.  There are exactly four ingredients, plus the stuff to be fried:

• 1 cup of flour
• 1 bottle of beer
• 1 egg white (or two if you want)
• oil for the deep fryer

The egg whites require a little attention, since you have to be able to break an egg into two parts without destroying the shell or losing the yolk.  I take great pride in my ability to transfer the yolk between the halves of the shell, dripping the whites into the bowl.  It's a delicate process.  And it's followed by a lot of violent whipping.  The egg whites need to be whipped into soft peaks (or until it won't fall out of the bowl, even when upside down).  I used to do this by hand, but Mary got a big mixer a while back, and it does the trick quite nicely.

So essentially, you just add the beer to the flour, whip up the egg whites in a separate bowl, then fold the egg whites into the batter right before you start frying things.  The puffy egg whites are what allow the batter to get all fluffy-crisp.

We cut up about four yukon gold potatoes, which turned out to be a LOT of chips for just two people, and we had about a pound of Alaskan wild cod.  Mary sliced up a big carrot too, for good measure, and she picked up some cheese curd lumps at Trader Joe's.  The potatoes got blanched for about four minutes in 300 degree oil, then set aside on a paper bag to drain.  This makes the potatoes softer for the final fry.  Then we were ready for the real stuff.

Frying may seem easy, but there are certain tricks.  Like dredging the fish in flour before battering it.  We fried everything at about 350 degrees, except for the candy bars.  A handfull of blanched chips went into the basket and then lowered into the oil.  The fish, however, was gently dropped into the oil.  The trick here is to let is slip into the oil at low velocity, to do it in a direction away from you (so the oil doesn't splash on you if you're a little rough), and to not get burned.  If you can keep the fish from immediately hitting the side of the frying basket, all the better, since it'll stick in place pretty easily.

After a couple of minutes, we dumped out the basket onto paper bags, and sprinkled some regular iodized salt on top.  And here's the real trick to cooking and eating fried food - start eating almost immediately.  Our fryer has about an 8x6 inch basket, so it took about four batches to get all of our fish and potatoes done.  As soon as the second batch went in, the first batch was cool enough to start eating.  If you wait too long, it gets cold, and it *will* get soggy.  So this method is not for neat dinner parties.  It's full-contact, huddle around the kitchen, fun food.  It's oily, messy, bad for you, and delicious.  We used canola oil, which is pretty decent, as oils go, so I'm not feeling too awfully bad about it.

The carrots went in a separate batch, and we did them just like American chips - thin sliced.  It's easy to over-cook thing things like that, but we did okay, and they ended up tasting a lot like fried sweet potatoes.

The cheese curds were each about the size of a walnut, and we had about a dozen of them.  Sadly, they sank to the bottom and stuck there.  When Mary dumped them out, we found that the bottoms had broken out, and the cheese had just streamed away into the oil, leaving what looked like hatched alien eggs.  A few survived, however, so we each got a couple.  Not too bad, but not as good as the fish, in my opinion.

We then cranked up the heat to 375 for the candy bars.  I was already stuffed by this point.  A half-pound of cod and two small potatoes were sitting on my stomach.  But we went ahead.  Mary froze the bars for a day ahead of time.  We had a dark chocolate Milky Way bar, and a Lumpy Bumpy Bar from Trader Joe's.  Both got battered and fried.  The Lumpy Bumpy bar was better, texture-wise, because of the peanuts inside, but the chocolate was better on the Milky Way bar.  I still can't believe I ate as much as I did.

Oh, and so everyone will know, as I was pouring the oil into the fryer - a dog hair drifted down from the bottle of oil, which had been sitting on the floor of the pantry.  I fished it out before we heated things up, but I'm almost certain that at least one hair wafted into the batter too.

As a final note about frying, we like the paper bag method pretty well.  In the past we have used paper towels lining a brownie pan, and a cooling rack with paper towels underneath.  The cooling rack is okay, but the paper towels just aren't really great for oily cooking.  Paper bags seem to be the way to go, for some reason.  We just tore up a couple of them, making two trays from each bag.  Works like a charm.