Stephanie Alexander’s crunchy mushroom chips

Hi, I'm Stephanie Alexander, and today I'm going to make mushroom fries. They're very crunchy, and they're very moreish. You can serve them just simply with a lemon wedge, but I like to serve them with a yoghurt dip. So I'm going to make the dip first of all before I get onto the frying, so all it is is one clove of garlic, which we smash and chop as finely as possible. Okay, one cup of yoghurt, a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper. We add the garlic to that, some beautiful fresh parsley. Always take the leaves away from the stems. Stems of course can be used in lots of things or alternatively go into your compost. And I've also got very fresh, lovely mint from the garden. Take the leaves from the stems again, because the leaves on the mint, the stems are actually quite tough. So I'm going to chop up both of those together. Okay, so we're going to put these herbs into my dip. Stir it all together. Okay, so that can just sit there and be ready for later. I'm now going to prepare the mushrooms. I'm preparing a tray with paper on it, and I'm going to put that in a very low oven, it's at 100 degrees, so it stays warm and I can put batch number one in there while I'm frying batch number two. Okay, so the next thing I do is actually slice my mushrooms. These little cap mushrooms are a good size, each one that probably yields about three or four nice slices. But don't forget to season the flower because the mushrooms do need quite a bit of seasoning. Good bit of salt in there. A bit of pepper, shake around. Continue to slice. Okay, now we're going to start the crumbing process. The trick is to try to do it all with one hand so you only get one hand being messy, but I've never really managed to achieve that myself. So into the flour they go. It’s a good idea to sort of try and shake off a bit of the excess flour before they go into the buttermilk. It's very important that there's been a good coating of buttermilk on these. You sort of shimmy this and as each slice is well and truly crumbed it goes onto this tray. Okay, so I'm now going to continue with the second batch, do exactly the same thing. Okay, now before I put the oil in the pan, I was wanting to draw attention to the fact that this is a nice solid frying pan, which is what you need before you fry anything. And now I'm going to add a good slosh of olive oil to the pan. Turning it on, from now on, I won't leave it on its own. I also have got three little tiny pieces of stale bread. And this is a great way of telling when your oil is hot enough and if it sizzles in about 10 seconds you know you're ready to go. I'm now going to gently place the mushroom fries in here. And not crowding the pan. When something’s frying, you don't want to keep fiddling with it or poking at it, cause you’re trying to get a crust. Okay, so now I’m ready to turn. Okay, so I'm going to take this out. And what I'm also going to do at the same time is turn off the oil. Strain the oil carefully to make sure that all those little tiny bits of crumb don't get back into the second lot. So I’m just going to get out my tray from the oven and transfer these fritters to this tray. We don't need those bits of bread anymore. And so that goes back in the oven until I'm ready for it. Okay, we have batch one and batch two all beautifully crisp. I'm just going to add a tiny little bit of sea salt. Lemon’s there, the dips there. Now it's important to get in and tuck in while they're hot. I'm going to put one drop of lemon on, dip it in the dip. Perhaps not the most elegant way of having it but at least it’s delicious.