As you all know, I have been to Sydney recently. We stayed at Adina Apartment Hotel in Surry Hills (which, by the way, I highly recommend – great value for money and perfect location) and Bill Granger’s bill’s was in the same building. We went there for lunch one day and I had the sweetcorn fritters with roasted tomato and bacon. It was very nice. So nice in fact that I decided to make it the other night. I don’t have any of Bill Granger’s books but thought I would see if I could find the recipe on the internet. Sure could. I was amazed how popular the recipe was. I found quite a few copies of it. It was, invariably, described by bloggers as the famous Bill Granger’s sweetcorn fritters.
The recipe is from Bill Granger’s Sydney Food. It serves 4.
Ingredients:
- 1 cup plain flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp paprika
- ¼ tsp salt
- 1 tbs sugar
- 2 eggs
- ½ cup milk
- 2 cups corn kernels. You are supposed to use fresh corn but I used frozen. It is the middle of winter in Perth and all the fresh stuff on the cob that I came across looked anaemic!
- ½ cup red capsicum, diced
- ½ cup spring onions, sliced
- ¼ cup of mixed coriander and parsley, chopped. I used all coriander as I didn’t want to buy a bunch of coriander and a bunch of parsley and it tasted fine. I am sure all parsley would taste equally good.
- oil for shallow frying
Tomatoes:
- 4 Roma tomatoes, cut in half length-wise
- olive oil to drizzle
- salt
- coarsely ground black pepper
To serve:
- 1 bunch rocket, washed and dried
- 4 bacon rashers*
Roasted Tomatoes:
- Preheat oven to 180°C.
- Place tomatoes on a baking tray with cut side up.
- Drizzle with olive oil and then sprinkle salt and pepper over tomato halves.
- Roast for 40 minutes.
Fritters:
- Sift all the dry ingredients into a bowl.
- Stir in sugar.
- Combine eggs and milk in a separate bowl.
- Gradually add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients, stirring all the while.
- In a separate bowl, combine corn kernels, red capsicum, spring onions and herbs.
- Add just enough batter to bind the ingredients together. I added too much. At bill’s restaurant, there was barely any batter. I presumed that you would need most of the batter so I didn’t note how much I was using but I think you could, probably, get away with only half of the amount in the recipe. Make the full amount the first time but really monitor how much you use. Don’t forget, you want the barest amount that will hold the fritters together.
Addendum 2014: I have been making these fritters quite a lot this year as I have piles of corn growing and I can confirm that only half the batter is necessary, so feel free to halve it (or double the vegetables). - Heat some oil in a large non-stick frying pan.
- Divide the dough into 8. I used egg rings (we are a bit obsessed with uniformity in our house) and we had the exact amount for 8 so that indicates how big they should be.
- Grill the bacon.
To Serve:
- Place one fritter on each plate.
- Top with 2 halves of roasted tomato, a rasher of bacon and a few leaves of rocket.
- Top with one more fritter.
- Season with salt and pepper, if desired.
*For the vegetarians out there: In his book (yes, I even found an extract from the book on-line), Bill Granger mentions that the sweetcorn fritters are also very good with an avocado salsa in lieu of the bacon.
Passion Fruit Garden 
Pingback: Corn fritters (Bhutteyan Da Kebab) | Passion Fruit Garden
Pingback: Corn Relish | Passion Fruit Garden
Made these a couple of nights ago and they were great. I used all of the batter though which made it really easy to put a big dollop into the pan without it spreading too thin (so I didn’t have to use the egg ring)
Hi Col, Thanks for the comment. When I had them in the restaurant there was virtually no batter – it seems, either way they taste great.
You caught me, Glenda – I was trying not to admit to you that I hadn’t done the tomatoes at all – I should have just fessed up in my last note. Just as your corn is out of season now, the only tomatoes we can get now are from Mexico or lower California – they’re OK, but still expensive – so we just wait patiently for a few weeks longer.
OK, next time I do these, I’ll follow your instructions – promise!
(have you noticed that if a string of comments starts getting long, WordPress just stops adding a ‘Reply’ button at the bottom of the last comment – as they’ve done with your last one above? That’s not very nice of them – sort of a type of censorship, or maybe it’s just a another WP glitch. Annoying.)
It’s funny, Doc, but tomatoes must be big in Australia. They are never not available. In winter, they cost more than in summer but they are always in the shops and always reasonably cheap. I figured, being summer your way, they would be plentiful.
BTW: I think if you press Reply to the original comment, it will line your latest comment up.
Thanks Sue.
That looks simply gorgeous, lovely photo.
Hi Doc – No, the tomatoes won’t turn to mush:) Roma tomatoes are the egg shaped Italian tomatoes – they have less juice than most varieties but you could use any type of tomato. Trust me, 40 minutes is not long.
I have a soft spot for fritters, too. I particularly like zucchini fritters.
You are lucky to have fresh corn – wrong time of the year for fresh corn down here.
Just so you know some of your readers actually do make the things you post, I made these a few nights ago – please apologize to Mr. Granger for me, as I did not exactly follow the recipe – seemed too thin and so I slipped in a little more flour – and I had the full cup in there before I remembered your instruction to go light on the batter – Do I still get credit for making them?
Even so, we thought them to be quite delicious. My mother used to make these as a break from my father’s insistence on an almost daily inclusion of corn from the summer garden – we all loved them, and I thought they were one of her better creations – but my mother insisted that corn was not a quality vegetable, and that we ate much too much of it – but my father saw to it that we got our fill all summer long.
Somewhere in my internet wanderings recently, I came on a recipe for broiled tomatoes (I swear I wasn’t checking behind your back) and I noticed that they called for an hour broil time! So there – I learned something new.
Hi Doc, The secret to these fritters is to use as little batter as possible. I probably used ⅔ of the batter and it was too much. In the restaurant, they used hardly any- just enough to keep everything together. The ones in the restaurant were better than mine as the batter does not have much flavour so the overall flavour of the dish was diminished. Did you roast the tomatoes in the oven? Roasted or semi dried tomatoes are very popular in Australia. Normally, I would have the oven lower and leave them in for much longer but the 40 minutes at 180˚C worked.
Boy do I love this kind of stuff! More than I should, I’m sure. OK, why not – I’ve got two left over ears of fresh corn (our summer is in full gear!) and you’ve done a good job selling this one – I’ll bite. Only one question, though: why will it take 40 mins to roast a tomato? Do you guys have different tomatoes than we do? Hey, this could be another surprise to me, but it just seems like 40 mins would turn the tomato to mush – ??? No?