My favourite food. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Or does it?

OK, so what has this got to do with learning to drive? Not much on the face of it but for me personally, it was a progression, of sorts.

Boring background: since I was about 20 years old, I’ve always been self-employed or involved a small business of one kind or another. I’ve done some interesting work, and some boring work, some exciting projects, and a lot inbetween, but generally I have enjoyed my work. I am the kind of person who likes being busy, and variety is fun.

I always had a vision for a restaurant but I wanted to focus on doing very simple things very well. So, I mulled the idea over for about 27 years and eventually the right series of events came up at the right time. After lots of delays, made even more so by the covid scamdemic, I opened a restaurant providing fish and chips – but done properly – no seed oils, additive free, all fried in beef fat or “beef dripping” as more acceptable parlance may have it. The restaurant got amazing reviews. Regular customers enthused about it. The food was, genuinely, good – not just in taste, but in the sense of only using wild fish, avoiding factory farming, keeping things natural and not involving chemical processes, all cooked to order, and making a point of not using food adulterants such as MSG, chemical soaking agents, aspartame, colourants or GMOs, and of course avoiding seed oils in favour of beef fat or dripping and only using butter or olive oil for pan frying and sauces.

However, for a number of reasons, it did not generate the volume or footfall we needed – except on Fridays. But I’m doubtful that it is possible or sensible to run a restaurant in a busy town centre being just about viable only one day a week and still expect such a venture to be sustainable.

I really kept prices nailed to the floor and my target was to sell a hundred dinners each day we were open. The best day ever we may have sold about 60. Most days it was a lot less, and some evenings were just dire. Raw materials and overheads (fish, potatoes, energy, manpower, insurance, waste) are all really considerable and margins are very tight if you are selling a finished dinner for £17! My vision was to build the business, focus on volume, then get someone else in to do the frying and ideally to take an interest in and some shared ownership of the venture, allowing me to take a step back and have more of a back seat role. I would have been happy to take a pocket money approach to it because I believed in the business, and our product was so good, but it proved impossible to find anyone willing to invest their own time and energy into it, and I was not keen to employ someone with all the nuisances and stress of modern employment especially for a micro business.

Frying fish and chips is physical work, and takes a toll on the body at any age but more so when you are in your fifties like me. So, after a year of enjoying the exhausting work and the great feedback (and the product) but not enjoying the bodily pain, and unable to find anyone to take over the day to day running of the place in such a way that would leave me with a fair return on investment, I decided it was best to close and let someone else take over the premises.

I was glad to have given it a shot but it was kind of a realisation that just doing something really good is not enough – I always thought that if you did anything really well you would make money at it and be successful but these days it seems you need to go online and be on instagram and everything else every five minutes and promote what you are doing in ways that I do not really understand nor want to engage with. I don’t like social media (brain rot as I think of it). In the last 35 years I have been involved with several businesses starting from scratch and have enjoyed the process – it’s exciting and sometimes it works, but equally sometimes it doesn’t, so you have to call it a day when your inner voice starts to nag that you should be feeling your notional stop-loss position ghosting into view.

Anyway my formerly highly rated fish and chip establishment has now been replaced by a really rather excellent restaurant called Canvas which serves exquisite food in the same pleasant surroundings in central Tunbridge Wells with some elegant tweaks, but obviously a different market altogether; fine dining and experiential which is perhaps more in keeping with the town.

Back to fish and chips. The point I am coming to in this article, or post, is that it took us a long time to get our product right.

One of the things I noticed about the fish frying industry was that it is generally populated by very pleasant people. However unfortunately almost all of them appear to be completely clueless about the product. Nobody seems to know, or care, which type of fish is best, which fat is best, and so on. When you start getting into detail, they either glaze over, say “Dunno mate” or something similar, or shrug and smile and say “You’ll be all right”, none of which is much help when you are making an effort to produce the absolute best fish and chips reasonably possible.

Therefore we went through a process over about three months of daily routinely frying a seemingly endless series of permutations of temperatures and durations until we refined what we were doing to a repeatable, simple, consistent formula for producing quite simply the best fish and chips possible – without resorting to the water boil, fluffing, and refrigeration, all of which just seemed like losing the will to live.

Of course it’s always the case that somebody will produce something better using fat gleaned from a herd of magical cows fed nothing but asparagus and potatoes harvested on a plateau in the Andes watered only with glacial drizzle from the fingertips of a shaman and anointed with the essence of Gwyneth Paltrow’s tiddle or whatever.

But leaving aside the ridiculous, our formula works for normal product you can buy at Bookers and from any popular online wholesaler of fish for the frying trade. It doesn’t take any genius and in fact is really just following numbers, being diligent and keeping a careful eye on the temperatures and times. Of course it is still hard work! But with modern frying ranges, a lot of the guesswork and drudge can be removed by the clever temperature control, timers, and of course filtration at the end of the shift which ensures the next day’s fry starts with a much cleaner frying medium.

How can fish and chips possibly be complicated? You may ask. Ah! Well, we did a lot of research and we experimented for months to get it right. Our chips were fantastic, I mean not just good, they were really truly excellent. People raved. They said that the chips really were the best they’d ever tasted. And they were! While the fish is comparatively fairly easy to get right, the chips are not.

It’s been nearly a year so I wanted to get the basics down before I forgot it all! For the record but also with a view to helping others. If you want to serve up the best chips ever, then just do this. Instructions below, in this post! No need to spend three months messing about endlessly and filing a log and keeping a kind of scientific journal of frying as we did. Just do the following.

Initially I was influenced by the notion promoted by Hawksmoor and others (upmarket steak and chips establishments that tend to offer beef dripping chips) that you chop up your spuds and boil them in salty water, then worry them somewhat in a tray to fluff them, and keep them in the fridge. For 24 hours! Good grief! I thought that’s a palaver. So we settled on a workaround. Here’s what we did.

Spuds. We experimented with loads of them. Russet Burbanks were the best. But availability was a problem so we settled for Maris Pipers and just bought them in big bags from Bookers. Sometimes they came from up north and sometimes Scotland or even from the west country, and often the batches were very different, so they needed slightly different frying times as I will explain below, but the process remains very much the same across all the different batches and crops of spuds.

We peeled all the potatoes by hand, using OXO goodgrips peelers which are fantastic, because I wanted to keep as much skin as we could on the spuds and we used a chipping machine operated by hand – Sammic CF-5 with a 10mm grid (8mm was too thin and 12mm too stout for us).

We soaked the chips in salty water and all our incoming water was filtered through a Pozzani inline filter (at mains incoming) to remove almost all the chlorine and some other contaminants. In my view it is important to use chlorine-free water for the soaking.

We did not use dry-wite or any other similar additives for soaking – just salt (the cheap kind in a plastic box from Booker). Chips were generally soaked for a minimum of 40 minutes but usually often for about 2-3 hours.

Triple stage frying. Yes, triple fried chips are a big cliché and have been for years. The last time I had them in a pub they were like pieces of plasticene that someone had carelessly microwaved then left on a window ledge over winter. Grim.

Most places mess it up. It’s not that tricky though! No great skill or intuition required but the procedures and timings need to be followed diligently.

The fry. So you use beef dripping – any reputable brand, but the one from Friars Pride called Fryer’s Choice I believe was consistently good and had a lot of flavour as it had not been fully de-odourized. Other beef drippings are available – most have been treated in some way to purify and essentially dull down the flavour with a de-odourizing process. Some of them are a bit plasticky tasting as a result. But still, they’re okay. We did initially also try an artisan brand but it just foamed and went horrible and murky after two or three frying sessions so that was no good – it was an impressive product in terms of taste but had too many original bits of cow (or as the industry may have it, impurities – maybe water soluble stuff, I’m not sure) left in it to be durable for long term reliable consistent frying! Whatever you do, avoid palm oil, generic seed oil “vegetable oil” brands like Frymax, or any kind of sunflower, rapeseed, corn oil, canola, pomace or any combination of any kind of seed oils or seed oil blend whether liquid or solid at room temperature. They are nasty, and not just in taste. Stick with beef fat, 100 per cent. The cheap brands of beef fat (dripping) are OK; we were paying about £2 a kilo, which seemed good value. It lasts very well, and keeps its integrity for a long time, and as you don’t need to crank it to very high temperatures, it can last longer than seed oils and of course be a lot better for health and for taste. Most of the products we used came from the north of Britain or Ireland.

So on to the first stage of the chip fry: the par. The first stage I call the par. Like a par-boil when you par-boil your roasties before shoving the in the oven laced with goose or beef fat and salt only this is a kind of rolling boil – at a lowish temperature – but all in beef fat instead of water!

So you ideally have two separate chip pans for your restaurant and they are each held at different temperatures throughout service. Our two chip pans were holding about 25-30kg each of fat, and could take two baskets side by side, each basket holding a max of about 4.5kg or a little over 5kg of raw chipped potatoes. Generally, half a kilo of raw chips translates to about 350-400g of finished product, which constitutes one good reasonably generous serving of chips. So about eight to ten servings can be par’d or finished at any one time, together.

Stage 1 is the par boil or rolling boil equivalent. No need to pfaff about boiling them in water and putting them in the fridge and wibbling about with them for 24 hours when you just can do this and still get a fantastic result. Heat the fat in your par pan (let’s say pan 1) to 118 degrees C. Dunk in one or two baskets of spuds – about 4kg per basket is fine. Let them sit there for 8 or 9 minutes. Do not shake them or move the basket at all. Then hoist them out and just let them sit like that in the basket so residual fat drains off them for a bit over the pan they cooked in. They’re kind of slippy, delicate, but retain their structure fine and will not stick or fall to bits provided you don’t shake them about.

After Stage 1 the chips need to just sit for at least 20 minutes, but will be just fine for 2 hours or more. Don’t shake them. They won’t stick, they’ll be fine. They’re slippery and sort of half-done and kind of borderline edible – if you’ve ever been to Scout camp, you’d probably think that was already a fair delicacy.

Stage 2. Ideally you have a second pan, let’s say pan 2, alongside and separate from the one used for the “par” (which is always at 118 degrees). Your second pan is always at 142 degrees. Stage 2 is three and a half or four minutes, or four and a half minutes, depending on the potato. Sometimes they’re a bit more watery or more dry, you just have to run a few brief experiments at the beginning of service to determine the optimum.

So you take your chips from stage 1 “par” (minimum resting 20 minutes) to stage 2 which I called the “pre” because it’s ahead of the “finish” (stage 3). The “pre” and the “finish” are pretty similar: both take place at 142 degrees C.

Please note that these temperatures work only for beef fat. Beef fat has a high specific heat capacity so is remarkably vigorous in the way it gives out its heat. Seed oils and other rubbishy oils don’t have the same heat capacity so all the temperatures would need to be adjusted, and arguably it wouldn’t work anyway. Another reason to avoid using any kind of seed oils. Keep it cow.

Note that our Kiremko range had very impressive heat retention and “recovery” so that even when dunking in six or eight or more kilos or raw chips, it rarely lost more than four or five degrees, and would come up back to temperature quickly. This is key for getting consistently good chips. If your deep frying kit or range struggles to recovery, then moderate how much product you dunk in – if it bogs, and loses lots of heat and takes ages to recover, then the product is going to be compromised at best and likely trashed completely as all the timings and the impact of the fry on the product will be out.

So if you’re not frying in beef fat (dripping) then I suggest don’t bother reading this – give up now and do some gardening or go and be a tree surgeon or librarian or something that won’t cause harm to others.

So OK back to Stage 2. So you have several baskets of chips which have had the Stage 1 (“par”) already and these are hanging around in a state of kind of suspended ensogment. When customers need chips then you measure out roughly what you need from the Stage 1 par’d chips into empty baskets for Stage 2 and then you fry for about three and a half minutes or four minutes at 142 degrees C, giving a little shake from time to time.

Then hoik them out and let them rest. They must rest for at least three minutes, ideally four or five minutes, before Stage 3!

Stage 3 is the “finish”. So you pop them in for three or three and a half minutes at 142 degrees. Same temperature as the “pre” (Stage 2). They will need a good shake and bounce and wobble to move them about in the fat as they fry.

Then bring them out, let them drain off for a minute or two, then into the colander and shake sea salt all over and serve.

And there you have it, the best chips ever. As reported by many customers and confirmed by myself and all our wonderful tasters!

But, you say, in the books it says you must fry at 170 or 180 degrees! No, rubbish, nonsense, not if you are using a good quality frying range and 100% beef fat. Maybe for seed oil frying higher temperatures are necessary but if you are into seed oil, really, go and take up stamp collecting and don’t waste time reading this because anyone who is still using those horrible seed oils is beyond hope and obviously has no interest in creating wonderful or healthful food. (Rant over, now on to the fish!)

And the fish? That’s relatively simple. The fish pan is heated to 170 degrees C. How to make the batter. Well you get a natural batter mix from a company called Ceres, which is pure and does not contain additives or rubbish. It’s the regular batter mix from Ceres, a very good product. Not the Yorkshire batter – that’s also good, in fact it’s very good if you like that type of batter, and many people do, but we just preferred the regular batter style – slightly more ridgy, bouncy, not much difference in crispyness between the two – the Yorkshire version seems to have less raising agent. We also used to do a very modest pre-dust before dunking in the batter – again, a Ceres product for the pre-dust, no MSG, just finely ground rice flour and a little sea salt.

To mix the batter we used 250g of Ceres batter mix (no MSG, no soy, no guar gum, no colourants, no additives, just flour and two simple old fashioned raising agents) to 400ml of fizzy water – this was usually cheap bottled fizzy water from Bookers or Sainsburys. We used to mix small batches of batter, so it was not hanging around, because it can separate and go a bit dunky if left for a time. So, 500g of batter to 800ml or water, or the same ratio, basically 5:8 flour to water. We added a little of Mr Lee Kum Kee’s Hong Kong dark soy sauce – just a dash – and a very little bit literally a drop or two of Fat Boy Fish Sauce from Thailand or the equivalent Thai Squid brand Fish Sauce. These give the batter a lovely subtle flavour and a tickle of a faint tang of joy on the tastebuds but none of that annoying chemical MSG effect which is found in many batters. So we would beat up the batter by hand, then dust the fish briefly in the Ceres pre-dust no.1, drape in the batter and then fry according to the size of fish. A small thin skinless fish about 5 to 6 minutes, a chunky piece of skin-on cod cut from the end of a big fillet, around 7 and a half to 8 minutes. You could usually tell by the batter going a slightly darker colour when it was done. Then the fish was “rested” on its side on a resting grill, above the fryer, for two to three minutes, so the excess fat could drain off.

And there it was – perfect fish, perfect chips.

Ah but you are saying – what sort of fish should one use and where did you get it?

Well, the honest answer is that we experimented a lot with fish merchants, wholesalers, fresh and frozen, and we discovered some interesting facts.

The fresh fish was sometimes very good, but often it was crap. Basically it was unreliable. Also in terms of sizing and overall quality, it did not stack up. You can’t serve fantastic fresh one week and iffy taste the next. Consistency is so important!

We tried the individually quick frozen, known as IQF, but the taste and quality just was not good enough. I think they spend too much time on the boats and then are individually quick frozen ashore, but by that time, a certain level of taint has set in, in my view.

The very best fish came from the Glacialis brand (Norebo) from Russian fleets operating out of Murmansk and similar grim dark places up by the Arctic Sea, Barents Sea, places like that. They use lines – very long lines with hundreds or thousands of hooks coming off them to catch the cod and haddock, then they haul the fish out of the dark frozen waters where they have been lurking and into their factory vessels and these cod and haddock tend to be big, chunky, and they claim to get them processed and frozen within four hours of catch. Being line caught is supposedly better as the fish are individually pulled into the boat and do not suffer being squashed against one another in a big heaving net.

The best tasting cod and haddock I ever had was skin-on bone-in F.A.S. (frozen at sea) from these Russian boats. Sure, the Danes, Norwegians, Spaniards and even the Brits bring in similar and still good quality FAS (frozen at sea) fish but whenever we had the Russian product the customers raved even more than usual and as I used to personally test drive the product every day we were open, they were right – for some reason the Russians just catch the best fish – or their processes are so fast and organised that they freeze them so quickly that they lock in all the flavour and freshness of the fish. Think of the most delicious chunky, meaty cod you ever had, that’s the Glacialis, and it seemed pretty consistent. I used to get the 8 to 16oz or 16 to 32 oz larger sizes and then cut them down based on customer orders. It worked well, as we did a fair bit of pan frying as well, and the chunky ends always worked great pan fried in butter!

We always got skin-on bone-in fish (pin bones, PBI or pin-bone-in as referred to in the trade) and although that makes a bit of a nuisance removing the pin bones with pliers or a Leatherman tool during prep, it’s just always got more taste. The skinless fish somehow loses something of the taste, and the boned fish, again, just seems to suffer in the integrity of flesh which loses something from being messed about with to have the bones removed before freezing.

So if you want to taste the pinnacle of fried cod or haddock my suggestion would be to get boxes of F.A.S. (frozen at sea) from the Russian trawlers – Glacialis is the brand to look for. However, any of the F.A.S. skin-on P.B.I. (pin bone in) fish is good. If I could not get Glacialis I was happy to settle for Kirkella which is British and I always like to support our own fishermen, as there do not seem to be many of them left, also the Gadus brand I believe from Norway was also usually reasonably good for skin-on although their skinless fish was in my opinion not so good – something about all the processing of removing skins and bones somehow gave it a rubbery quality; I don’t know why. The Danish (Royal Greenland brand) is probably the next best after the Russians for haddock and their cod was also often close in terms of quality to Glacialis.

The only downside of FAS fish is that it comes in a big block of about 7kg and the fillets are packed tight, usually interleaved with blue plastic rectangles. So, either you defrost a whole box at once, or you play a game of prising the fillets out and away from each other without damaging them or causing them to crack or split. Usually, after a very little thawing, it’s possible to prise out what you need and pop the rest back in the freezer. But, you have to do this many hours ahead of service as the frozen fillets can be big and they often need up to 20 hours to defost, once transferred to the fish fridge (usually around 2 or 3 degrees C). So an element of forward planning is needed with FAS however we found that the product was so incredibly fresh that it would keep for two or three days in the fish fridge (having defrosted) without any hint of taint. The “taint” is the smell of dread with fish as when you are frying you are basically steaming the fish in batter, and you must have a really good product, because unlike with (say) a curry where you could probably hide any slight taint under all the spices, or perhaps marinate the fish in some way first, fish fried in batter needs to be top notch fresh otherwise it will give off a rank odour as soon as the batter is breached followed by an equally rank flavour.

We used a Kiremko Allegro three pan range which was a fantastic piece of kit, though it is arguably the case that for smaller quantities, any good quality gas-powered pan with a decently quick “recovery time” would be just fine. The recovery time (i.e. how quickly the pan can recover its heat back to correct frying temperature) after dunking in the raw product is critical to a successful fry. Also, we used a Testo device which enabled us to know when the fat had passed its best. Oddly, the suppliers were unsure if it worked with beef fat as they only tested it with so-called “vegetable” fats (those pesky seed oils again!) but it seemed to me to be a reliable device and the readings seemed consistent when tested with brand new fat and also when the fat had really reached the end of its life: even with filtering, you can usually tell by the look and aroma of the frying medium when it’s “had its chips” so to speak and needs to be drained out and sent for recycling into jet fuel or whatever they do with it.

Good luck frying! I hope this article has been useful and helpful.