Chip Butty: The British Empire Strikes Back

NEVER TELL ME THE ah you’re probably right.

We’ve had a rough go of it with British sandwiches here at the Tribunal. From back bacon to British Rail, from breakfast rolls to Branston Pickle–there’s been the occasional high point, but never without at least as many lows on the way.

This month the List landed on yet another British favorite: the chip butty.

“Butty” is simply an English term for a sandwich on buttered bread. Chips are the British version of French fries. Sandwiches with French fries in them are rare but not unheard of in the US–Primanti Brothers in Pittsburgh is famous for them, and even Burger King made one for a while. Chicago has its own share, from the Depression Dog to some of Gus’ wilder creations at Wiener and Still Champion in Evanston. We even have our own Primanti Brothers knockoff in Lucky’s Sandwich Company, now catering to drunks in both Wrigleyville and University Village.

But that doesn’t quite get us to the British style chip butty.

I asked some of the usual suspects on Twitter about it, and got a somewhat rhapsodical response from my old mate Ian, in a tweet now lost to history.

https://twitter.com/SandwichMeats/status/605468542734102528

He seemed pretty excited about them, boosting my optimism for the subject. I have a usual haunt down my way when seeking English or Irish ingredients but this time I decided to try someplace different. I took a long lunch break one day, riding a Divvy bike on a 12 mile round trip up to Spencer’s Jolly Posh Foods in the Southport Corridor of Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood to see what I could find.

In addition to a few inside tables and an outdoor seating area where they serve meat pies, afternoon tea, and “civilized sandwiches,” Spencer’s also has shelves of British and Irish dry goods, condiments, etc. A tall slender fellow named Matt spotted me perusing the shop area and offered to help, so I asked him what he thought of chip butties, which came out sounding like “chip buddies” filtered through my midwestern mushmouth.

“Chip butties?” he asked, sticking the hard T like a 14 year old Olympic gymnast on a perfect dismount. “Yeah, love ’em. Chips, hot buttered bread… what more could one want?”

I asked what condiments someone might use, in case there were more one could want. “A little salt or pepper. Some people like ketchup, or obviously HP”–prounced haitch pee–“sauce, or HP Fruity.”

Malt vinegar? “Sarson’s, definitely.”

What about ketchup? Is the British stuff different than the sugary glop we get here in the states? He looked at me quizzically, not unkindly but as if worried that I’d gotten heat stroke on my long ride, and shook his head slowly.

So, loaded up with British condiments, a bag of jelly babies for my kids, and a steak and ale pie for later, I made my way back to the office (after trying some Nashville-style hot fried chicken at Roost while I was in the neighborhood).

The steak and ale pie was fantastic. Also, I owe my kids a bag of jelly babies.

On Making Chips

The differences between British chips and the type of fresh-cut fries common around here are that chips are cut thicker (around 1/2″ instead of 1/4″) and from peeled potatoes (whereas our fries often have the skin on). The recipes I read online universally recommended soaking the chips in cold water to leech excess starch from them before cooking.

The cooking techniques are essentially the same though. To get fries that are crisp on the outside and nicely fluffy and cooked on the inside, you use russet potatoes, you make sure they’re good and dry before they go into the oil (unless you want to start a grease fire), and you fry them twice.

The first fry is at a lower temperature, to seal the outsides and slowly cook the insides.

Then the potatoes usually cool to room temperature before being fried the second time at a higher temperature, to crisp up and brown the outside.

With fresh-cut fries, the procedure I’m familiar with is to fry the first time at 325°F, and the second time at 375°F. When I tried that with chips, though, the outsides got very brown, very fast during the second cook, without sufficient time to reheat the insides all the way through or to get the surface as crispy as I’d like.

I found that with the thicker chips, the second fry worked better at 350°F for about 4-5 minutes to get a nice golden brown color, good temperature all the way through, and a crisp surface.

Butty, barm, or bap?

My first attempt at the chip butty was on a buttered kaiser roll, so depending on the pedantry of the person you ask, it might have been more akin to a chip cob, barm, bap, or more likely a chip roll rather than a chip butty. Also, I made it with the dark, not-as-crisp chips from my initial attempt at chip-making. This may have had something to do with my less-than-ideal results.

I lined up an array of condiments to add bite by bite–this is a lot of calories in a single sandwich and there was no way I was going to be able to eat full sandwiches with each individual embellishment. I had Sarson’s malt vinegar, HP and HP Fruity, ketchup, and Branston pickle, which, while not a standard chip butty condiment, just makes sense since it’s brown-sauce-based and incredibly British. And hey, they do it that way in Northern Virginia.

I tried the sandwich plain first, just the buttered roll and the salted chips. Never mind Subway bread, this must be what eating yoga mats is like. Dry carb on dry carb, with little-to-no hint of the fatty slick of butter that should have helped ease this down.

I added a bit of malt vinegar and got a bare hint of flavor in my next bite. I added more malt vinegar to bring it above my taste threshold. I tried some HP Fruity, which helped accentuate the malt vinegar and give the sandwich some much needed flavor. The regular HP brought out the malt vinegar even more. Then I tried ketchup, which only reminded me of how much I don’t like ketchup.

The best of these condiments that I tried was the Branston pickle, its brown sauce base also boosting the flavor of the malt vinegar, while the bits of pickled vegetables added much-needed textural variation and additional acidic bite.

This sandwich was a mess, and not a good one. But I’d ignored one of the keys to the chip butty, as provided by my pal Steve, again in a since-deleted tweet:

https://twitter.com/TedwardBouillon/status/605461310503948288

That Bread Though…

I had to be honest with myself; the kaiser rolls had been a bad idea. The sheer thickness of the carb onslaught made a chip butty on kaiser unworkable. I’d had a bit of a sourdough starter going for a while, so I decided to bake a nice loaf of bread and try using that instead. I started with a biga using some baker’s yeast, warm water, bread flour, and my sourdough starter and let it ferment in the refrigerator overnight.

I combined half the biga with some more bread flour, water, olive oil, and salt in the bowl of my stand mixer, ran the dough hook on slow for about 10 minutes, then allowed it to rise in an oiled, covered bowl for a couple of hours. I proofed the loaf in a loaf pan for about another 45 minutes before baking it at 350°F for just over an hour, removing it from the pan and letting it sit in the cooling oven for another 15 minutes to help develop the crust. It turned out pretty good.

I then proceeded to get drunk enough to eat a chip butty, thus learning another valuable lesson:

my chip butty research so far has revealed that when I'm drunk enough to want a chip butty I'm too drunk to make chips #sandwichproblems

— Sandwich Death Panel Czar (@JimBehymer) June 5, 2015

In my times of need, when I have drunk and happy feet, a little money in my pocket, and the drunken munchies, I have any number of walkable places to get a burrito or a sub but not too many that will serve thick-cut English chips, and regular fries are out of the question for this purpose. It was going to have to be a DIY, but the full cooking process is too complicated for the required state of inebriation. I sliced and pre-fried some more chips, separated them into butty-sized baggies, and stored them in the refrigerator in preparation for my next window of drunkenness.

Hockey Leads Me Astray

On Saturday, June 6th, the Chicago Blackhawks played the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2nd game of the Stanley Cup finals. My friends were getting back from the Lagunitas Beer Circus right around the time the puck dropped, and my beer was on tap at their place (I’d brought a keg there for a party the previous weekend), so I headed over with the intention of getting drunk and watching the ‘Hawks win.

I accomplished one of those things.

After a good game but a disappointing finish, my friends disappeared one by one to sleep off their day in the sun while I was incredibly entertained by the obvious good time Brent Sopel was having during his postgame analysis. Also by his excellent mustache, his stringy hockey hair, his obvious Canadianisms. By 9:30 pm, the conversation had turned to grits, and the powerful craving I felt for grits at that moment told me that I was probably ready for a pile of carbs. By 10pm or so, with the game well over and my host nodding off on the couch, I excused myself to go home and make a Canadian-inspired chip butty that would likely leave my British friends in a tizzy.

You see, while shopping for items for this post, I’d also picked up these, and had made some of each just to try, storing the remainder in the fridge.

And what foodie’s larder this close to Wisconsin would not contain cheddar cheese curds? *

• well for one, mine usually wouldn’t. I did happen to have some on hand at this time though.

Probably most people have heard of poutine at this point, but if you haven’t, poutine is a French-Canadian drinking snack consisting of fries, cheese curds, and gravy. I’m not a particular fan of it mostly–though I have a weakness for its American cousin, chili cheese fries–but it seemed like the perfect snack after a night of hockey, and putting it between two slices of my homemade sourdough bread appealed to a certain absurdist sensibility within me.

First I placed cheese curds and chips on one slice of buttered bread.

Then I added some of the Bisto gravy, which turned out quite thick but disappointingly mild in flavor.

With the top slice of buttered bread on, and with the contents smashed down, it was a less imposing pile of carbs than the previous example. And with the salty cheese and the mild-but-savory gravy, it had more textural and flavor variety as well.

It was still huge, though. I shared bites of it around to my wife and those of my kids who were still awake, but it came back to me hardly touched. I thought there was no way I’d be able to finish it. Somehow I drunkenly soldiered through. I hardly ate at all on Sunday though.

Let’s Irish Things Up

I suppose they’re equally common on the menus of British chip shops, but I first experienced curry chips at an Irish pub in Chicago and initial impressions being what they are, I have since thought of them as an Irish thing. Mentions of chip shop curry sauce on a chip butty are not as common as HP sauce or ketchup, but it seems like a relatively common addition. I’ve tried making a similar sauce from scratch but I haven’t gotten it quite right. The mix is cheap and terrible but delicious. I’m hooked on the stuff.

I fried up the most perfect round of chips yet, and added them to buttered slices of sourdough.

Then added the curry sauce

I wasn’t even drunk and this was the best butty I’d had. That chip shop curry sauce–which admittedly I’d enhanced with a little additional Madras curry powder–delivers a lot of flavor in a little package, with a bit of sweetness, some chili kick, and a whole lot of Indian spices. I’ll need to find an easier way to buy the mix than riding to Lakeview during lunch, as I think I’ll be going through quite a bit of it.

If I’m to be completely honest though, bread is just holding the deliciousness of these fried potatoes back. Give me a good pub burger and I’ll take the curry chips on the side. I’m not sure why fries in a sandwich needs to be a thing at all–it seems more like a stunt than a good sandwich filling. As for fries being the only thing in the sandwich, well, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe there’s a strange new level of drunk in England where you can’t hit your mouth with anything smaller than a phone book, so individual chips are out.