Gluten Free Beer Battered Fried Fish

Delicious Fish and Chips!

Last night Tim (my husband) made us an AMAZING Beer Battered Fish and Chips for dinner!  I asked him to write a guest post for the blog, I will warn you he has a VERY different cooking style than I do.  We joke that I'm a scientist and he is an artist, because I HAVE to measure everything and have a plan, he on the other hand, adds a dash of this and a pinch of that and it comes out perfect.  I cannot cook the way he does, and he can't comprehend cooking the way I do, and that's how we get fed around here.  So here it goes, I hope you enjoy Tim's cooking too!

Tim's Gluten Free Beer Battered Fish

I always get inspired to make things that are typically quite gluten filled, and then I adapt them for a gluten free meal.  The other night, I was really in the mood to deep fry, and we were having a couple over for dinner, who always give me lots of liberty to experiment. They suggested Fish and Chips.

For the Chips, I used a pretty well known and standard recipe. Cut the potatoes, wash off the starch, and then pat them VERY dry. Fry them at 375. Take them out, drain them on a rack, and then fry them again. Season liberally, before the oil dries. That's easy.

So, I decided to make a beer batter. After Googling regular beer batter recipes, and then gluten free recipes, I adapted, and made my own. I made a test strip, tweaked the batter, and made a second, which was pretty perfect, and highly praised by all who sampled.

Here’s what I did:

8 tilapia filets, sliced in half, lengthwise, separating the thinner ones and thicker ones in two separate piles, so when I fried them, they’d cook evenly. I did not want to mix and match the thicknesses, and end up overcooking the thinner ones.

The beer batter was:

1 cup of sweet rice flour, Paprika, Kosher Salt, Ground White Pepper, Ground Black Pepper, (I have a mill for the black pepper, but I like the store-bought ground white, because it’s a super fine ground.) I don’t really know how much I put in. I put in more than I thought I would. Then, after the first test strip, realized it needed quite a bit more. So I added more.

I mixed all the dry ingredients. Then, I took 1 egg, which I beat in another bowl, first. And then mixed in the egg, and whisked that.

Then I whisked, while slowly adding in the beer. I used a whole bottle of ice cold New Grist, right out of the fridge.

I covered the fish strip in tapioca starch, shook off the loose starch, and then immediately dropped it into the batter, swooshing it around to get full coverage, and put it into the fryer, into vegetable oil at 375 degrees, almost still dripping. The consistency of the batter was so thin, you could almost see the fish in there, under the batter. Andrea was concerned with the thin-ness of the batter (as was I, but I didn’t voice it), but it worked.

We have a Fry Daddy fryer, so it fit 3-4 strips comfortably in the basket, without touching each other. I fried until they were golden brown, took them out, and drained them on paper towels, flipping to drain both sides. That was it!

In between each batch, I re-whisked the batter to keep it from separating.

The four of us finished almost all but two of the thin strips, which means four people ate 3.5 pounds of fish. I’m making a note here: huge success!