Ginger Beer Battered Fish & Chips

Ginger Beer Battered Fish and Chips is a tasty out of the box recipe. And why not if you are going to all the effort of frying fish and chips at home!

Hands up who doesn’t make fish and chips at home. I know I generally don’t, quite honestly who on earth could be bothered. There is oil and then the fish, plus making your own chips on top of that. It’s much easier to head to your local fish and chip takeaway or the pub for your fried fix.

I say I generally don’t but then every so often an urge comes over me to deep fry some fish at home. A stupid bloody urge to be honest, but it does. There is one major bonus of dipping fish in batter and deep frying it at home. It’s the batter, you have complete control and creativity. That my friend is my draw card to homemade fish and chips.

For around six months now I have wanted to make ginger beer battered fish at home. A non alcoholic take on beer battered fish. You could use any bubbly elixir of your choice. Champagne battered fish and chips anyone?

It’s all about the liquid being bubbly and cold. Make sure your ginger beer is as icy as you can get it.

The batter for ginger beer battered fish has sweet notes once cooked. The first time I tried it I was a little surprised. Luckily the flavour marries very well with flathead fillets. The sweetness accentuates the subtle flavour of the fish.

Don’t have flathead in your part of the world? It’s okay, you are missing out, but you will survive. The bonus to this is, you can use fillets from your favourite white fish.

Making Chips from Scratch (gahhhhhh!)

You are more than welcome to scratch the chip making session and put some frozen fries in the oven instead. Between you and me, this recipe was nearly accompanied by gherkins and my potato salad in the photos.

But chips I did fry, just for you. I decided I was going to try Heston Blumenthal’s triple cooked chip recipe. What we ended up with was Heston’s triple cooked chip recipe if he was working out of a domestic kitchen and couldn’t be assed.

I do love the theory behind his recipe. What I didn’t like was putting fried potato chips in my freezer to chill down before the final fry. My nose was already having convulsions at the thought of my freezer smelling like oil.

My simpler triple cooked method is what we ended up with. They are crunchy, but so is a packet of frozen fries thrown in the oven.

Please don’t let me deter you from frying up your own chips, there is a satisfying reward to it when you are serving them alongside your ginger beer battered fish. It isn't like you don’t already have the hot oil at the ready.

All in the name of Sauce

A basic tartare sauce was what I had envisaged serving the ginger beer battered fish with. It was really an afterthought on the day. I hadn’t planned on any sauce at all, completely slipped my mind. I was probably still trying to navigate Heston’s time consuming triple chip recipe process.

I didn’t have any parsley, therefore no tartare sauce. I could have made a classic marie rose sauce, but I wanted something with a little more umpf.

This is how we ended up with Sara’s Tasty Sauce for Fried Fish. Basically I couldn’t think of a name for it, my creative juices weren’t flowing at all. The sauce has a great kick of horseradish, hints of a classic marie rose, and given some more bite with finely diced cornichons.

It’s a very tasty sauce if I do say so myself. It’s bold enough to slather on the ginger beer battered fish, yet doesn’t take away the delicate sweetness of the fish and batter.

As mentioned earlier, the fun part of frying fish at home is you can be creative with the batter. Why not experiment? Use different kinds of fizzy liquid, mix through herbs, spices, zests of citrus, the options are endless. Just get creative! That’s the joy of cooking at home.

Sara xxx

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