Something's Fishy - My First Try at Frying

On the morning of December 31, 2016, my mom put forth a propostition: "一人一菜"。Basically, for dinner, every family member was to make a dish for dinner. While my parents already had some pig feet going, my sister took the easy route and assembled (not made) a strawberry and whip cream dessert. Which left me with a main dish.

Man, what was I gonna do?


This year has been pretty crazy for me: in the last year alone, I had three concussions, went to the middle of Minnesota, made a bunch of friends in Minnesota, went to Italy and ate good food, coached a middle school wrestling team (to a near shutout of our rival), and gotten into a college. If this year couldn't get any more eventful, I decided to go all in and make an East Coast classic: Fish and Chips.

The selection of fish, surprisingly, was a challenge - I know most fish and chips dishes are made using cod or haddock, but being in California, we have neither. But as I entered the fish section of Costco, my mind flashed back to a certain article about eating like Dwayne Johnson. Some netizen wanted to copy The Rock's diet, but didn't have enough money to pay for 6 meals of cod a day. Thus, he went with tilapia (which I believe is a PSAT joke from 2014 or 2015). The recipe I chose to follow is from acclaimed family blog Woks of Life: their beer batter fish fry with potato wedges.

Instead of potato wedges, I went with the more traditional fries, the recipe for I basically guessed off the top of my head. But for the beer batter, I had to procure some "lager". Being a good boy, I know not what a "lager" is, instead sending my dad off to Nob Hill to pick some up. I got a good idea on how bad a lager smelled when I poured all 12 ounces of it into the dry mixture. Man, I know they say that people who drink stink, but if I'm going to be around a bunch of stinky drunk people in college you can count me out. The rest of the prep went very smoothly - fish don't tend to be alive when they're filet, so that was some smooth sailing. I used a Chef's knife to cut the fish and potatoes, and while the potatoes were fine, the tilapia was a little stretchy, which caused me to use a little more force than I intended to. Luckily, all ten digits remain as I dismembered fish and mutilated red skinned potatoes. I know most recipes call for russet potatoes, but I was kinda feeling the Irish red-skinned ones today. Prep went smooth, but frying is terrifrying.

At first it can look very calm. Its kind of like, "hey it's a calm pool of oil! It
can't be that bad!" Then you remember that you're heating this pool of oil up to 300 degrees and decide that this could be very rough. Remember, like in the chemistry lab, lab instruments do not seem hot until they are touched. Then they seem very hot. Luckily no burns were suffered in the course of frying 6 batches of tilapia and 5 batches of fries. When all was said and done with the fries, I felt that the initial 5 batches paled in comparison to the ones I had seen at In n Out and even McDonalds. Determined not to be outdone by million-dollar corporations, I decided to re-fry the sixth and final batch of fries. Initially I kept the frying temperature at around 300 degrees Fahrenheit, but this time I ramped it up to 400 degrees. I scooped the fries back into my ladle out of the oil strainer and carefully let the mayonnaise colored fries slide into the sizzling oil. And after the bubbles cleared, I lifted 28 bars of gold out of the oil.

In one of my final acts of 2016, I had done it.

I had made fries.

You can find me on Instagram as @stumpyeatsfood and on yelp at theplumpcat.yelp.com. If you've got a restaurant recommendation or even a recipe that you think I should try, send it to me at ryanjchen2@gmail.com! Thank you for reading!