A new project idea

I'm a ridiculous know-it-all, any time I see a business being run I'm convinced I know how to do it better and the food industry strikes me as ripe for improvement almost always...it MUST be easy right? Anyway I was talking about this some time ago to my brother who told me about a chip shop he'd travelled more than an hour to visit. It only open's twice a week on Friday's and Saturday lunchtimes and reputedly has a queue out the door. He said they were some of the best fish and chips he'd had. So as a result I was interested to find out more about it...

Today I visited the famous Upton Chippie in Upton near Gainsborough, North Lincolnshire. This is a BBC Look North segment from their webpage about the shop.

My interested was really in that the chip fryers are heated by coal. Recently I started to cook bacon in a pan on top of my log burning stove. The slow and constant heat combined with the bacon taking a little time to cook somehow made the bacon taste extra nice... well at least in my mind it does. It seems to have a nicer texture and more intense flavour than the bacon cooked on the gas hob. I had similar hopes for the chips from the coal powered fryer!

The chippie was busy and the staff friendly letting me take snaps and telling me about how the fryers work. I asked about temperature regulation and the lady in charge said that it was quite an art to getting the fire right and the temperatures right. The fryer had a coal hole at each end and a long tube for the fire up the middle below each of the fryers. There are a number of storage areas to keep the food warm along the top of the fryer.

In this picture Sally Shaw the co-owner is moving stuff about in the hot oil. You can see the fire grate's door at bottom right. There was a similar one at bottom left.

 I was only a tiny bit disappointed with the chips. The chips are a bit, well soggy. I'm not saying that they aren't everything they are supposed to be. I'd sort of put it into my mind that they would be crisp and chunky because that's what I suspect I've been conditioned to think a "good" chip looks like. These aren't supposed to be gourmet chips though, they are supposed to be traditional and I am certain they are JUST as they would have been in 1950. They are made using beef dripping. I had cod and that was very nice indeed. The chips were nice too, just not what I had imagined. To emphasis, this chip shop is about tradition and I was going with a mind for quality. Though there isn't really any question that these chips were comparable with the best chips I've had anywhere else.

When I visited my friend Glen in Grantham "Shades of Japan" at his woodworking shop where he had a very good gas bottle stove in his workshop and I got to thinking... could you build a fryer out of one?

Soon in a blog article I'll be telling you how Jarkman (Richard Sewell) helped me make a titanium spork. In the meantime I've been looking at his project "Steve's Stove"  as I'd like to try and make a portable coal fired fryer from an old Gas bottle. I suspect I'll be going for a bit more showman ship than tradition.

I want to make a great crisp modern chip that people might like to think is old and traditional because, lets face it most people won't have had an old traditional chip and like many experiences in life, we could just make them up to suit our pre-conceptions. More on this project as it happens!

I hope to put wheels and a steam whistle on it too!