'Whole Fish Cookbook' - Josh Niland
Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2020 5:38 pm
I'm a bit of a cookbook hoarder, so when it came out late last year I picked up a copy of Josh Niland's Whole Fish Cookbook. He has a restaurant in Sydney, as well as a 'fish butchery'. The term sounds a little wanky, but makes sense given what he does -- advocating the use of fish offal, and dry-aging whole fish (mostly larger specimens) in the same way a butcher might dry age a beef rib eye. Being Australian, most of the fish he refers to are Australian -- a mix of stuff we're likely to catch, as well as the sorts of things you'd get further up north. He suggests many substitutions, too.
I've prepared a couple of his recipes, one using a store-bought fish (a substitute to what he originally called for) and another using a flathead I picked up at Warneet. I was really happy with the way the flathead recipe turned out. Both recipes were on the simpler side, as are most of the ones I've bookmarked to try -- e.g. a whole King George Whiting Kiev. On the whole the book is good, although it's mostly skewed towards serious cooks -- and a few recipes are clearly aimed at actual chefs in commercial kitchens with connections to good quality suppliers (I don't mind spending half the day in the kitchen sometimes, but there are ingredients I'd struggle to source in the quantities he calls for). His ideas are interesting, although he doesn't necessarily communicate all of them as well as I'd like. I can't identify all of a fish's organs by sight, and I'm surprised that a book -- the first book I've encountered on this subject -- that advocates the use of offal doesn't provide a pictoral guide. The photos are pretty good, otherwise, so this is surprising. It's not like walking into a decent butcher, where it's easy to ask for liver or kidney or what have you, or where these organs are easily identifiable. That said, he gets bonus points for giving a bit of air time to less-loved species.
I've prepared a couple of his recipes, one using a store-bought fish (a substitute to what he originally called for) and another using a flathead I picked up at Warneet. I was really happy with the way the flathead recipe turned out. Both recipes were on the simpler side, as are most of the ones I've bookmarked to try -- e.g. a whole King George Whiting Kiev. On the whole the book is good, although it's mostly skewed towards serious cooks -- and a few recipes are clearly aimed at actual chefs in commercial kitchens with connections to good quality suppliers (I don't mind spending half the day in the kitchen sometimes, but there are ingredients I'd struggle to source in the quantities he calls for). His ideas are interesting, although he doesn't necessarily communicate all of them as well as I'd like. I can't identify all of a fish's organs by sight, and I'm surprised that a book -- the first book I've encountered on this subject -- that advocates the use of offal doesn't provide a pictoral guide. The photos are pretty good, otherwise, so this is surprising. It's not like walking into a decent butcher, where it's easy to ask for liver or kidney or what have you, or where these organs are easily identifiable. That said, he gets bonus points for giving a bit of air time to less-loved species.