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Thread: Fish & Chips

  1. #51
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    Quote Originally Posted by toslti View Post
    From what I have heard the Banchang crowd is a lot smaller now. The menu kept getting reduced and the quality went down. No business.... shut the doors.
    Jeez that's a shame. I haven't been there in a month or two (we haven't been playing Golf down that way lately) but we must have eaten there hundreds of times, literally, on the way back from Golf and have never had a bad meal there. Sad to know it's gone now...

    Quote Originally Posted by cyrille View Post
    HW...could you please confirm your choice of #1 F+C in Pattaya?

    We may make a trip there in August.

    Thanks.
    Robin Hood is my pick, the Cod or Haddock on a Friday is always the special and they churn them out by the dozen. Retox churn them out by the hundred on Fridays (or any other day for that matter) and it's a close race but I find the batter just a bit lighter at RH. Maybe that's due to the cooking time?. I don't cook fried food so I don't know how they get it just right.

    Quote Originally Posted by Loy Toy View Post
    You obviously are easily pleased.
    Fuck off dickhead. Hey aren't you banned from posting in the food sections because all you ever added was LC standard gob-shite?. Fuck off anyway, dickhead.

  2. #52
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    Its more about the batter than the fish.











    It fed an embattled nation during the second world war, and, in Yorkshire, it could yet spark a third conflagration – if you to try fry it in vegetable oil. Over 150 years after it was "invented", it remains Britain's favourite takeaway. There are still, it is reported, eight chippies for every branch of McDonald's. But what makes great fish and chips? It's time to separate the truth from the codswallop.

    Cooked where?

    At the chippy, and only the chippy. Yes, in theory, you could cook fish and chips at home. But is it wise? Unless your local chippy is one of those fraudulent frozen fish and gristle-burger joints, then its fryers will invariably be armed with better batter and fatter fillets than you can muster. Plus, fish and chips is supposed to feel like a treat. You can't have a "chippy tea", if you are the chippy.

    Fish and chips in a pub or restaurant, meanwhile, just feels wrong. It shouldn't be eaten indoors, with a knife and fork. More importantly, professional chefs can rarely cook fish and chips without refining it: spiking the batter with vodka; minting the mushy peas; serving your "chunky" chips in a metal bucket (it's the seaside, geddit?); all of which detracts from the dirty pleasure of fish and chips. Plus, to justify that £11 price tag, restaurants tend to serve ludicrously big portions.

    In a restaurant, your fish and chips will be cooked to order, but your local chippy should be doing that too. If not, find one that does.

    Served how?

    In a polystyrene tray or one of those posh corrugated-cardboard boxes. To be eaten with a tiny, fiddly wooden fork and greasy fingers. It's the only way. Picture it: it's Friday, chippy tea night. Was the magic not lost the moment your mum insisted on getting the plates out? Exactly. You knew this instinctively even before (thanks, Harold McGee) you had the scientific evidence to prove it. To stay crisp, batter needs circulating air. Any steam needs to be able to escape. Sat on a plate, trapped under hot fish, it will quickly reabsorb moisture and get soggy.

    Skin on, skin off?

    Off. The fish is essentially a delivery vehicle for the batter. Who wants to scrape 50% of it off an unwelcome gluey insole?

    Condiments
    Salt, Sarsons, no pepper. Never tomato sauce. Gravy or curry sauce with chips, but not with fish. It's barbaric. As for tartare sauce, a good, homemade caper-packed one is a wonderful thing, but you do have to choose between tartare or mushy peas. There is something about the cashmere textural comfort of freshly cooked, vibrant mushy peas and the sharp, creamy jangle of tartare that jars. Each places fish and chips in a different register.

    Sides

    Garden peas are not acceptable. Baked beans take the whole plate in a different sweeter direction and are better kept separate and eaten with chips. Bread and butter is essential, the chip butty an exceptional amuse and / or savoury course, as you see fit.

    Drinks

    Strong tea, light beer or your favourite fizzy pop. Personally, I think cola's caramel flavours are the most complementary. Either way, there's a lot of grease here, you need plenty of (preferably carbonated) liquid, to cut through it. Wine is a waste, water too bloating.

    Chips

    Yes, you definitely need chips. In fact I would go as far as to say, you can't have fish and chips without them. And chips, as Oliver Thring touched on recently here, doesn't mean fries, huge wedges, oven or frozen, it means Maris Pipers chipped that morning, as thick as your finger, and cooked to perfection within a spectrum that starts, if using veg oil, at golden and buttery, and ends, equally fluffily, if frying in beef dripping, with chips the colour of autumn leaves.

    Personally, I don't think triple-cooked work, here. That glassy, shattering exterior, that clinically perfect interior, produces a chip that, in this context, is too dry.

    Fish

    Cod or haddock? Haddock or cod? I don't really care. As long as it is fresh, sweet and muscular enough to separate into big satisfying flakes – and is sustainably caught, of course - there is almost nothing to choose between the two. And both, ultimately, are secondary to the batter.

    Batter

    The real star of the fish and chips show, batter (which should be cooked through with no raw batter within), is at its best when it is well seasoned and made using a raising agent, beer or malt vinegar, which, as Felicity Cloake has observed, delivers a nicely "citric" twist.

    Now, as you may have noticed, batters differ massively, in terms of their colour (determined by the type of flour, the amount of salt used and sometimes added colourings), and their surface texture. Batters can be smooth, spiky, swirly, curly. I had assumed, on the occasions that I have pondered this each side of the Lancashire (flatter), Yorkshire (spikier) border, that this was due to the different oils used, but apparently – and thanks to the National Federation of Fish Friers and Mark Drummond at Towngate Fisheries for the technical info – it's down to the raising agent, the amount you add and how much the batter has been beaten. "Why different areas of the country like different batter styles, I can't say," concedes Drummond. But they do, with the big food service outfits offering numerous batter mixes, including a rippled Scottish one.

    The best? I will happily eat either, but for me it's got be a flat batter cooked in veg oil. A well-seasoned light, but not tempura-light, batter delivers enough flavour without overwhelming the fish, whereas fish cooked in beef dripping can be more reminiscent of roast dinner. The fish should steam within a sealed carapace of batter. Spikier batters tend to crack, leaving the fish exposed, and the final product heavy and oily.

    That said, chips cooked in vegetable oil are often bland and anaemic, where their bronzed, beef-cooked cousins both look better and pack an unbeatable, residual savoury oomph. Therefore, until some far-sighted chip shop starts frying its fish in veg oil and its chips in beef dripping (would that even work, harmoniously, in the mouth?), my absolutely perfect plate of fish and chips may remain a distant dream.

  3. #53
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    Yes hundreds of times LC. I can't remember when we first started going there but it was a long time ago, must be ballpark 10 years. So we'd eat our breakfast there (golfers lite with tea for me every time) then grab one of the 3 blackboard specials on the way home or if none of them were appealing, order something off the menu. The club sandwich and F&C were always good backups. We would sometimes eat there 2 or 4 or even 6 times in one week going back a long way, but certainly every time we played golf in Ban Chang. So yeah, hundreds.

    And thanks for the green, that'll teach you to smash the keyboard in a fit of rage while screaming
    Bllllllllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhh! you dickhead

  4. #54
    Excommunicated baldrick's Avatar
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    not a fan of batter - would rather just fry in alightly oiled pan

    if you go to makro you can buy fresh perch and they will fillet it for you - probably take off the skin if you asked
    and you can bring the frame and head home for the missus

  5. #55
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    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post
    Served how?

    In a polystyrene tray or one of those posh corrugated-cardboard boxes. To be eaten with a tiny, fiddly wooden fork and greasy fingers.
    Not on your nelly. Blank, clean newsprint as the first layer then newspapers for the 2nd and 3rd layers of the wrapping, with a hole torn out of the end of the package to vent the steam. No wooden fork, just fingers.


    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post
    Salt, Sarsons, no pepper. Never tomato sauce. Gravy or curry sauce with chips, but not with fish. It's barbaric. As for tartare sauce, a good, homemade caper-packed one is a wonderful thing, but you do have to choose between tartare or mushy peas
    Salt, a smidge of fine ground white pepper, and lemon wedges for squeezing to taste. Maybe tatare if you have it.
    Agree, never tom sauce on your fish.


    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post
    Sides
    Nil. Nothing but fish and chips.


    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post
    A well-seasoned light, but not tempura-light, batter delivers enough flavour without overwhelming the fish,
    Agree.

  6. #56
    Hangin' Around cyrille's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Maanaam View Post
    Blank, clean newsprint


    The stuff people come up with on here.

    Leave it for the newspaper industry.

  7. #57
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    Not seeing any blank clean newsprint here. These fish and chips don't look like a prime example imo...



    Is this still allowed in the UK?

    They used to say “Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper”. That was of course before the worthy guardians of public health and safety decided that wrapping food in newspaper was an unhealthy practice. Something to do with eating poisonous lead from printing ink with our battered cod apparently!

  8. #58
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyrille View Post
    The stuff people come up with on here.
    You're taking the piss, surely. Been that way from chippies for 100 years. Actuallly, I lie...before it was just old newspapers then, probably in the 80's, health department got involved and the chippies had to use new newsprint paper.

  9. #59
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    They forgot to mention vinegar in the list �� condiments.

  10. #60
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cujo View Post
    They forgot to mention vinegar in the list �� condiments.
    Quote Originally Posted by taxexile View Post
    Condiments Salt, Sarsons,
    "Sarsons" is a vinegar of repute.

    "The vinegar was first brewed by Thomas Sarson in 1794 from malt barley. James Thomas Sarson was a vinegar maker living at Brunswick Place, Shoreditch in 1841"

    Fish & Chips-tj1030-jpg

    https://www.sarsons.co.uk/
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Fish & Chips-tj1030-jpg  

  11. #61
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    Quote Originally Posted by SKkin View Post
    Not seeing any blank clean newsprint here. These fish and chips don't look like a prime example imo...



    Is this still allowed in the UK?
    Newspaper definitely adds to the taste, can't imagine why it's been banned in UK. Johny Isaacs in Whitechapel had the best newspaper.

  12. #62
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cujo View Post
    Good prices. What's the nosh like?

    Rather good. The lady know how to cook the fish. All done to order. Opens from about 4.30 pm until the early hours.

  13. #63
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    Quote Originally Posted by Maanaam View Post
    Not on your nelly. Blank, clean newsprint as the first layer then newspapers for the 2nd and 3rd layers of the wrapping, with a hole torn out of the end of the package to vent the steam. No wooden fork, just fingers.
    .
    Thought it was always a layer of greaseproof or white paper, then wrapped in newspaper? Been a few years now mind. But yes, a cardboard box or a polystyrene tray- meh.

  14. #64
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    ^They stopped wrapping in newspaper quite a while ago (in the UK), on the grounds of "hygiene" quite a while ago now.. Dunno if it was some sort of EU directive..?

  15. #65
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cujo View Post
    They forgot to mention vinegar in the list �� condiments.
    I was wondering what Sarson's was. Yes vinegar OR lemon do go well with battered fish and chips. I can go with either, but would choose lemon with the fish and vinegar with the chips if I had a choice

  16. #66
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    The image being used, # 61 and elsewhere, must be the worst example shown here. Over battered fish and overdone chips, IMHO.

  17. #67
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    as a long long time lover of fish and chips,its always been difficult to get good fish here in korat.many moons ago a lot of those that live in patts.recomended
    INDIAN HALIBUT,we now have it at foodland so tomorrow i shall get a kilo to try.
    anyone had it,in batter of course,home made double fried chips and batchelors mushy peas.

  18. #68
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    Quote Originally Posted by headhunter View Post
    its always been difficult to get good fish here in korat
    Do you go to the fresh/wet markets? Barramundi and barracuda both make good fish and chips. You just have to be able to fillet them yourself. BArracuda makes for a thick fillet, easily filleted boneless, and if cooked just right is a moist and flavoursome fish.

  19. #69
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    ^soggy limpy fries...

  20. #70
    Hangin' Around cyrille's Avatar
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    ...and everything straight from the freezer.


    Nobody else thinks that sort of stuff is 'aspirational' food, plies. Not even the people who sell it.

    A cheese sandwich with just cheese and sliced bread, for example.

    It's a dead giveaway.

  21. #71
    Hangin' Around cyrille's Avatar
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    I'm referring to the picture, obviously.

    I'd assumed the link to the yellowtails was an american college football fixture or something.

  22. #72
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    Quote Originally Posted by Maanaam View Post
    Do you go to the fresh/wet markets? Barramundi and barracuda both make good fish and chips. You just have to be able to fillet them yourself. BArracuda makes for a thick fillet, easily filleted boneless, and if cooked just right is a moist and flavoursome fish.
    thanks for the reply,asked the wife about a wet/market in korat,what i have seen the fish are limmited to thai's.i used to buy barramundi at makro this was the best till foodland opened here.they have pacific cod [frozen] but there is more water than flesh.i do like the idea of trying barracuda could be simuler to hake [scavangers] of the sea.

  23. #73
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    Quote Originally Posted by cyrille View Post
    plies
    So it is him. Jeezus how many nicks is this clown on now?

  24. #74
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    Quote Originally Posted by Club Soda View Post
    Did you follow the link off the picture?
    Are you still pretending you're not 1-2 Mike Plies?

  25. #75
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    Quote Originally Posted by Club Soda View Post
    I'm neither
    So, you're one of the three.

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