I’m Tyler McLanan.

I’m the executive chef at the Austin Country club.

In this episode of food connections, I’ll be making beer battered Wall.

If you ever wondered how great beer batt is made, I’ll show you a simple way.

Learn how we make it.

It’s very, very easy.

Join us on the next food connections.

Hi, everyone, welcome to another edition of food connections.

Today, we are featuring Tyler McClanghan, the executive chef at the Austin Country Club, and he’s going to be cooking up some wonderful things for us here.

We’re very excited.

So welcome, Tyler.

Very nice to meet you.

So, yeah, we’re very excited about your recipe you’re going to share with us today.

And so first of all, can I just ask you, um how long have you been at the country club?

So I’ve been out to Austin country here for about a year.

Okay.

And how did you happen to get started in cooking?

So it kind of started from young age.

What kind of sparked my my passion, I guess, for cooking was kind of watching my dad every episode, like every every time he cooked it was like an episode of chopped where it was what do we have, what can we make?

What can you do?

And my menus kind of emulate that.

I’m very familiar with that, so growing up there.

That’s great.

So you learned from the master, more at least according to him.

Yeah, well, good for you.

And then now you do you incorporate a lot of those things that you learned into your own dishes and your own creations now, then?

Yeah, absolutely.

still kind of the what can we make out of this kind of type attitude, thinking back to kind of what my dad would do and kind of some stuff like that and just making it happen.

Well, I think you had said that the recipe you’re going to do today happens to be one of your dad’s famous and favorite recipes.

am I right?

It is this is Papa McLanahans beer batter.

All right, very good.

I can’t wait to try it.

Let me tell you.

So why don’t we get right into it and you can show us how this comes about you can create your magic, okay?

We’ll start with the batter first.

sounds great.

All right.

Perfect.

Let’s got mix some bow here.

Now, what do you have set up here?

What is this?

So this is our m is it called again?

M’s a French term for basically your prep, your setup, kind of helps you stage everything, get it here first, that way when you go to cook, you can just focus on cooking.

You can just grab the ingredient you want, add it in, you don’t have to go searching or are going through all this very nice.

so you could actually I don’t know if you do, but you could actually have this measured out exactly what you need ahead of head of time to save yourself time during your cooking camp.

All right, very good.. All right, let’s go.

Well, we will start with the dry ingredients first.

so we will add our flour first.

Thank you.

All right.

Then we will add in here, we’ve got our baking powder, onion powder, garlic powder and salt.

We’ll go with those next.

Thank you.

just make sure those are nice and mixed together, so we got the dry mix.

And next, we will start with the wet ingredients, so we will go with the milk first, about a cup there.

You could use whole or 2% whatever you want and whatever you got in the fridge.

and then we’ll do the beer.

I’m using a light beer here, but you could incorporate whatever flavor you want in there if you’re more of a fan of the IPAs, you could actually throw those in there..

So we’ll kind of get those going a little bit and get that mixed up.

Now, is this the batter that you use for your dishes at the country club?

Yes, everything we do beer battered from scratch comes with our secret recipe here.

So that’s where we go to get the good stuff.

I get it very good, very good.

Yes, sir.

We’ll just want to make sure we get as many lumps out of here as possible.

Sure.

And then we’ll do that.

And then we want to finish this off with the eggs with the two whole eggs.

goes mixed in there.

and then we’ll finish it off a little bit of canal oil.

All right.

It’s gonna give it kind of that velvety texture we were looking for.

Sure, great.

And if you’re ever making this batter, the key with this batter is to have a very, very, very thin coating, so it’s a very thin batter.

It almost seems like it’s too thin, but it works out in the end.

Well, it’s almost well, not quite as I mean, it’s thinner than cake batter, certainly, but it’s not, you know, it’s almost more like cape batter or something.

a little thinner like that.

So okay, that’s good to know.

absolutely.

So we’ll get rid of this over here.

Now that our batter’s kind of done, we’ll set that aside.

and next, we’ll go into preparing the wallet, before I do that, I’m gonna show kind of a garnish we can use to make a little nicer as fancier cut on a lemon, if you will.. Yeah, it’s nice to have your nice looking plate.

Absolutely, we’ll start up.

and cutting off the ends.

It’s peeling.

absolutely.

Without stabbing through our hand, here we go to the other side completely, and all the way down, we leave the knife in, settle on its side.

Get he didn’t cut through?

Nope, not all the way through.

Just to the end.

we take a knife, cut all the way down, flip it.

down again.

and then we can safely pull this knife out and set it aside.

We’ve got kind of a nice little garnish for the top of the plate here.

We’ll set that aside.

That’s really nice for a fish dish.

Elevate us a little bit.

Because you’re gonna be making what is it?

No, I’m sorry, we didn’t mention that before.

So, the beer battered walleye with our homemade chips as well with Papa McClanahan’s famous beer batter.

McCan, all right, good enough.. And then when we’re gonna go prepare the fish here, a trick kind of a tip for people at home and we’re going to our cutting board would be to place a wet towel, so we just soak this in some water.

if we throw this down on the table first, get that nice and even, and then we go and we set this guy down, what this is gonna do is make it so your board doesn’t slide so it’s implanted.

Because as everybody knows, they do slide all over your chosh.

Oh, Jesus.

And then it’s a hazard, you know, as as far as when you’re using knives.

Absolutely.

So next, we’ll cut the walleye here, so we’re using wild Canadian walleye.

Couple whole fla, just with the bones out.

You could leave these hole and go ahead and dip them right in and fry them for this purpose of the smaller fryer kind of the at home fry people would have we’re gonna kind of cut this down.

So we’ll just cut a nice piece here.

We’ve got two nice pieces there.

Is this the wall I use at the country club?

Yes, same wall that we use enough.

They’re nice, yeah.

Yep.

Absolutely.

We’ll do the same.

have a nice cut there.

Perfect.

So these are all boneless too, you got none of the ribs in there, anything like that.

We’ll step that aside.

Now, for cooking, when we do the chips, we always want to do the chips first because they can kind of sit and hold and we don’t wanna do the fish first and that the batter gets sogg, so we’ll start out next by doing some of our homemade chips.

With our homemade chips, we just slice the potatoes very thin.

you can use a maline or something like that, or you can use a special tool that my dad’s got from the 1950s.s.

He’s, I can’t imagine what that is toato do.

He’s got it’s a little old school antique mandolin and he swears by it Says it’s the only thing he can use and his actually broke a while back and he went and bought a few more from eBay.

He was pretty jazzed.

boy, I’ll bet he was his great tool, yeah.solutely.

So the key to these to have a nice crispy potato chip is to soak them overnight in salt water.

So we let those sit for 24 hours in salt water, drain all the water off, and that’s kind of gonna give you that extra little crisp that draws the starch out.

Oh sure.

Yeah.

Perfect.. We’ll get a couple of baskets down here.

Yeah, these are nice and nice and thin.

Now you’ve got um what kind of oil in there?

So they were just using straight canola oil.

And it’s at what temperature would you set it up for this?

350 degrees for the purpose of the fish, the batter cooks perfectly at 350 so I’m trying to maintain that temperature..

Perfect.

We’ll start off with some of these chips, and the key is just making sure we kind squeeze a lot of that water out of there and put the basket down first, and then we go straight into the oil with these guys, obviously as carefully as possible.

And you don’t have to these with anything, you’re just going right in the oil.

straight in the hot oil.

You can kind of hear they’ll cook quick with the finish your list, yeah.

If you’ve got a bigger outdoor kind of fryer, you can do these things by the handful and just drop in kind of a hand, you know, you could do it in a a pan on your stove.

No, you can certainly def fry sure.

Once we get these in here, the other thing the salt water does so over it kind of helps them so they don’t stick together, they don’t clump in the fry.

that’s good to know.

So they just want mix them around a little bit?

Sure.

Now when you soak these overnight, do you soak them in your refrigerator?

Yes, you to keep them cold.

Keep cold, keep them crisp and that starts.

So what this go, there’ll be about three, four minutes.

I’ll let these guys roll.

Okay.

And of course, you gotta have chips with your fish, right?

I mean, that’s just that just goes so well together.

Absolutely.

And store bought chips don’t do adjustice.

No have the nice homeade chips.

No, they they never do, do they?

No.

When we go up north on our family fishing trip, I think we go through about 20 baskets of these chips before anybody even touches fish.

Oh my gosh.

Well, yeah, it’s one of those things you can just pick up and walk around eating, you know, and and great.

They are hit.

And this beer batter too, it’s very universal, so when we do our fish fries too.

it’s great for chicken strips, cheese curds, onion rings.

It’s a very universal batter that goes to just about anything.

See, that’s great.

Yeah, if you use it at the country club on on all your battered dishes, then it’ll go worth anything.

sure.olutely.

I see they’re starting to get a little around the edges.

We’ll look for them to be a nice golden brawn by the time they’re done here.

and they’re kind of waving a little bit or crining just a little bit like potato sugar you know, you know., like a niceinship.

gosh, they are good.. I’ll kind of let those go for a minute.

With some of these smaller fry too, sometimes it’s a little tricky with the temperature.

when you drop these cold chips in there, kind of like an ice cube into the oil right Yeah, so when you’re cooking an industrial fryer goes a little faster, these homemade ones, you just gotta be patient with them.

Now I know someone who has a small fryer like this that uses it for camping trips.

Oh, and you know, I mean, because then it’s portable to take with you in your camp or in your in your car van or whatever, so these are kind of are very handy.

Yeah, absolutely.

You can kind of see they’re starting to crisp up there where they hit and look for a little bit of golden brown to make sure they’re nice and when you get them sliced nice and thin the way they are, it’s almost just like biting into air.

It’s a nice thin and crispy.

crispy chip.

And like I said, they’re shaping curling just a little bit just like just like uh potato chips, like chip pie of the bag, but but better, of course., come on.

But yeah, they do they take on that nice natural potato potato chip form, they do.

I love potato chips this will be a treat.

How often does anyone get homemade potato chips?

Oh on.

Yeah, it’s kind of hard to find them nowadays.

Yeah, and you also do these at dele, right?

When we run our fish fry specials, yeah.

Oh, I see, okay.

So typically on Fridays, we’ll run our our wallet fish fry special.

Oh sure.

We’ll with it I’ll bet that’s popular.

Absolutely.

I mean wallet isn’t offered a whole lot.

So I think that’s great.

Yeah, a lot of people default for cob because it’s a slightly cheaper fish, but with it being in Minnesota, you can’t go wrong with wall.

Oh, boy, that’s for sure, that’s for sure.

Absolutely.

We were just talking earlier about walleye fishing and things like that.

Oh yeah.

Absolutely.

So now that you can see it took on that golden brown, we’ll pull these guys up.

Very nice.

We’ll let those rest for just a second here.

That didn’t take long at all.

No, we’ll shake off some of the excess oil.

Then we’ll go straight into a bowl here.

And then the key to making these excellent is a healthy portion of seasoning salt.

Oh.

So getting these guys nice and coated in the seasoning salt.

And right when they come out, that’s gonna help it stick a little bit ice to, huh?

Yep.

So, yeah, if you catch them right up, they come out, you can kind of see that it sticks on there and cold it’s real nice.

Yum.

When these guys can consider from warm cold, they’ll be good if they sit for hours, they they stay pretty crispy and fresh for quite a long.

Oh, they look so good, absolutely.

And nice and crisp?

Absolutely.

Oh, yes.

I have another tip for you today.

Um Most kitchens have numerous knives that we use and um at home and in your restaurants and things like that.

I just want to show you two of my favorites that you used all the time.

The first and very common is a chef’s knife.

This is your biggest and probably heaviest knife.

And it is, um we used to call them butcher knife.

And so this is a large blade and it is used, oh, it’s great for like cutting squashes and things like that.

and your heavy duty work, right?

Cutting large large pieces of meat and things, and you can see the blade is kind of curves up at the tip.

So you can use this real well like if you’re chopping with a rocking motion on your cutting board, things like that, so that’s a very important knife.

Now, my favorite knife, this is called a Santoku knife.

Santoco means three values, and the three things that this is known for is slicing, dicing and mincing.

So you can see the bottom of this blade goes straight across, and there are small grooves, and that helps you cut through whatever you’re cutting all these little grooves on both sides of this knife.

And this is just great again, and it’s a little bit lighter knife, and it’s very well balanced.

You don’t need you don’t need to spend a lot of money on your knives necessarily for home.

but you don’t want to you don’t want to get the real teeny, real light light nothing knives.

You want to have them a little bit of weight and have a good balance, and that’s what this Santoku does.

I use this and a paiaring knife at home for everything.

And um it’s just very handy, it’s a nice size and it’ll do everything for you.

Next, we’ll work on getting our fish dropped in.

Okay.

So, I was important to change gloves, avoiding across contamination anywhere.

Right, that is important.

I like to see that at home.

It’s something you don’t have to worry as much about, but when you’re you know, when you’re cooking for someone else, other people and stuff like that, it’s very important, isn’t it?

Absolutely.

One of the cool things about this batter as opposed to some other batters, a lot of time you see they’ve got the fry station where it’s it’s you know, you’re going from your liquid to your flour to your to your batter.

and in this one, you don’t.

it’s a perfect batter, it coes me nicely, so you don’t even need any flour, you don’t need any any eggs.

That’s nice.

because in that case, then you use one one gloved hand for the dry and one gloved hand for the wet batter, is that right?

But yeah, this is kind of nice that you don’t have to this is just one step once you’ve got your beer batter made.

Absolutely.

so we’ll go ahead and get those in there, get them coated real nice.

and you can kind of see what the batter being thin, we want it to run off.

We don’t wanna have a tonic extra batter.

All right.

Okay.

We’ll get the fish up.

I can try to get all the excess almost so you can see the fish through there, right?

see it.

And then when you’re dropping these the keys to not let go right away.

That’s how they stick to your baskets.

So you kind of wave it around that oil for a second, then slowly lay it down in there.

Sure.

And that’ll be kind of nice.

go ahead and do the same thing again.

and get those dropped.

We’ll start up with those two.

Okay.

And then when it comes to these guys, they’re pretty self reliant about halfway through, I’d say, about a minute and a half in, you wanna just flip it over to make sure that the batter is getting kind of even even browning on both sides there.

But as you can see with it be in a thin batter already right away on the top, it sort of bomb pretty quick.

Well, and it’s puffing up, you can see the batter puffing up and the fish has risen to the top.

and so it’s getting a little airy.. And as long as you have those pieces of fish kind of nice and thin, it’s really easy to tell when they’re done basically when you’re if you’re at 350 and you go two, three minutes aside and you get that nice golden brown, you’re fishing because don’t look.

So now we can see it’s brown a little bit, we’ll wanna go ahead and flip those over.

Oh, nice.

Absolutely.

Get that nice, even coat.

Boy, they’re looking good?

Absolutely.

I can’t wait.

Yeah, and like I said, a great b matter for everything.

chicken strips, you know, onion rings, cheese currs, I was onion rings that work at cheese curds, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, come on.

Absolutely.

Well, I don’t know why you’ve got the batter made and you’ve got the oil hot.

Why not do some variety things right?

like you know, you were doing two today, but you could do some variety of things for the family.

Up north, we usually get a little weird.

My dad will tell the kids to kind of bring what they want to, so I’ve seen deep Fritos, I’ve seen Twinkies, I’ve seen gummy bears.

Don’t try gummy bears.

Deep fried Oos are wonderful, though, but yeah, that’s great.

that’s good idea.

oh, yeah, kids that have a lot of fun.

The gummy bears turned into a sticky oil mask.

course they gonna try gummy bears that come on, but yeah, I think I might pass into.

So then while this is getting ready, actually what we can do is we can go ahead and move on to our plating here.

All right.

So, wouldn’t mind here.

I just gotta put the plate down, and I gotta grab a spoon here.

here.

Right behind you in the first door.

Sorry.

Perfect.

And for the plating, we will take our housem made tartar sauce.

Now, I do have some the ingredients here to show I did make it ahead of time, but we’ve got mail.

we’ve got sweet relish we go with, and then rather than like the dill relish..

Lemon juice.. and then a little bit of salt and pepper.

and then what kind of sets are a part a little bit different is chopped capers.

and the chopped capers kind of give it that extra little little with that little zing, that little acid by yellow.

Oh, that’s a great idea.

Yep, so we got those in there, so for the plating, what we’ll do we’ll kind of take a nice dollop of that, hit that up on the outside, and then a good swoosh.

just a nice up there, yep.

Very easy to you can show off to your friends, kind of make it look a little fancier., sure.

So now what we can do is we can take the chips, and we can go back.

We’ll put a nice pile of this right in the middle of the plate.

Just kind of get all this down there.

And then by that time our fish looks great, perfect.

so we’re sitting at the nice golden brown, so that’s kind of right what we’re gonna pull it.

We’ll let it rests for a second.

One of the best things to do is to take it out of this basket and throw it into just a we could use paper towels most of the time a paper towel lined tray here, just kind of soak up some of that extra grease.

Now these little crispies left in the in the basket are like chefs little chefs little treats because they’ yeah, they’re really good and nice and crispy little things there.

little chefsacks.

I’d be better.f snack, that’s a good one, yes.

Darn wrestly.

So then what we’ll do while that’s kind of soaking a little bit in the paper towels, we’ll get some of our garnish ready, so for today we’ve just got some fresh parsley.

So we’ll just kind of get a sprig of the fresh parsley off.

We’ll take one of our nice lemons that we cut earlier, kind of get that there.

and then for this, we’ll just take the fish and we’ll place it right on top of the we’ll show off that nice batter.

Oh boy, kind of just go right on top of that in a nice pile.

Now, is this gonna impress your friends or what come on?

And then just for fun here, we’ll throw a little bit of that green right on there and just kind of give it a nice Oh my gosh.

Tyler, that is wonderful.

and and easy.

Yeah, something very easy for everyone to at home.

Anyone can do it at home, right?

And and my hope is to kind of share, I think everyone in Minnesota has had a fish brown experience of fish we all have it, and everyone goes up to the cabins and does all their fishing, so sharing a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of a nice recipe for people to pass down.

That is it is just a great idea, and that’s just a beautiful plate.

That’s just really amazing.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

I really, really appreciate this.

It’s been a lot of fun and and learned a lot.

I learned a lot today.

you know, I’ve done this for a long time, but I learned something new from every chef that we work with.

you know what I mean, I really do.

It’s a beauty of cooking, you never know it all.

Oh, geeiz, yeah, you might think so, but no, that that’s very true.

I learn some of them from everybody every day.solutely.

That’s right.

Well, thank you so much.

We appreciate that.

Yes, you better.

I’ve got a little tip for you today.

I don’t know if everyone knows, but honey is the one food in the world that will never, ever, ever spoil, ever.

So sometimes when we’ve got it in the jar or the little squirt bottle in our cupboard, it gets all crystallized in the bottom.

So you think, oh, I can’t use that.

I have to throw it away.

You do not have to throw it away.

Set that jar or bottle in a bowl of warm or hot water for 10 to 15 minutes.

It’ll come right back.

You can use it just how you normally would.

It’ll be nice and smooth again until next time.

I’ve got a great tip for everyone on how to use the little small flower tortillas.

Put one or two in your toaster and watch it.

You don’t want it to get too brown.

Watch in there, and you will see it puff up and and it’ll be hollow in the middle.

Pop those out, take it from the side and put a slid in it with a with a knife, um just part way through, and then it will open up just like a pita bread.

You can fill that whatever you want, you can make like a taco, pita in there, taco meat, cheese, tomatoes, whatever you like, you can fill it with guacamole with chicken salad, with anything you like, and it’s a great way to just carry around that sandwich.

It’s not falling all out like a tortilla or something, well.

One of the best tips I can offer you today is just to remember to have fun.

A lot of people forget that cooking is supposed to be fun.

It’s not supposed to be hard, not supposed to be a chore.

So all the trial and air in the world you could possibly do to create dishes and just make them your own.

on top of that, a good way to do that is just finding existing recipes or recipes you might know about, trying them the way they are, the way they’re supposed to be, and then kind of adding your own twists and your own turns.

A lot of chefs do that where they tweak things to kind of make them their own dish.