Smoked Cod and Chips

When I lived in Ireland one of the great pleasures in life was to adjourn to a local chippy called Caffola's and devour a beatifully cooked smoked cod and chips. The cod was only lightly smoked, more to give flavour than preserve and added a delightful high note to a wonderful dish. It was a truly great way to prepare for an evening out at Rocky's followed by Badger Brown's.

I've always loved smoked fish; salmon, mackerel, haddock etc.

I've recently found smoked cod becoming available more widely in the UK so I decided to attempt to recreate the experience.

In consulting various cookery books and looking online I discovered an argumentative group of people who either create or collect frying batter recipes and my goodness there are a lot of them.

In the end I settled on a batter recipe that was a synthesis of several of the others and so here it is:

• 2/3 cup of strong flour
• 1/3 cup of cornflour (For Americans that is cornstarch)
• 1 generous pinch of salt
• 1 spoonful of castor sugar
• 1 cup of good water (mineral or filtered)
• 2 egg whites whipped to soft peaks

Sift the dry ingredient together in a mixing bowl and add the water gradually, mixing until a smooth paste is formed - I would normally expect to have some water left over. Fold a little of the egg whites into the paste to loosen it, fold about half the remaining egg whites in and finally fold the remaining egg whites in.

To batter and cook the smoked cod I cut it into nice fillets, dried them with kitchen towel and coated in a little flour.

I had a wok with combined sunflower and avocado oil ready heated - I tested the temperature by dropping a small piece of batter in and checking that it puffed and crisped within a few seconds.

I passed the prepared cod through the batter and slowly lowered it into the wok so that the batter in the oil had a chance to seal and puff before it came into contact with the base or sides of the wok or other cooking pieces. For a large piece of cod I allowed 12 minutes cooking time and for a smaller one I allowed 9 minutes. The cod floated as it cooked so I turned it over every few minutes to ensure that both sides cooked evenly.

For a first pass I didn't do any chips, I just served it with a herb salad and a large piece of lemon.

It was really quite good. In fact it was bloody delicious.

I'm going to take a little more time on the batter to get it absolutely perfect but so far, so good.