Saint Peter chef Josh Niland s tips for buying the best and freshest fish
Josh Niland
Photo: Rob Palmer/Hardie Grant
Seafood-loving chef Josh Niland shares 10 top tips for buying excellent quality seafood.
Have a game plan: Know how many you are feeding and what methods of cookery you have available to you before you go to the fish shop.
Know what to look for (whole fish): Glistening eyes that are bulbous and clear, a firmness in appearance and to the touch, scales that are tightly composed and are unaffected by bruising, abrasions or deep cuts, and a light ocean or seaweed odour.
Niland is no stranger to breaking the mould. He introduced the fine dining world to fish blood boudin noir, made monkfish liver sexy and served mirror dory eyeball crackers when he opened his first restaurant back in 2017.
He was one of the first to pivot to an online takeaway service when lockdown hit in 2020, rallying out-of-work chefs across Sydney to collaborate on menus. And now he s set to open a hybrid restaurant specifically designed to withstand lockdowns, serving fish that tastes like barbecue chicken, with the texture of pork.
With any luck and the eventual easing of construction restrictions, Charcoal Fish will open in Rose Bay in August. And that crazy-sounding fish Niland s so excited about? That s Aquna Murray cod, a sustainable fish farmed in Griffith, which will be cooked over wood-fire and served with Ottolenghi-style salads.
Four recipes from Saint Peter chef Josh Niland s new seafood cookbook
Josh Niland
Photo: Rob Palmer/Hardie Grant
Take One Fish,combines the scale-to-tail cookery of his first award-winning recipe collection,
The Whole Fish Cookbook, with a new maturity and accessibility, showing home cooks how to explore the many culinary possibilities of using whole fish.
Red gurnard, seaweed and dauphine potato pie
Everything old is new again. I first made this dauphine potato recipe as an apprentice chef; the mashed potato was mixed with choux pastry then spooned into the deep-fryer and cooked until crisp and fluffy. All these years later, I decided it would make the perfect topping for my gurnard and seaweed pie. Red gurnard is the ideal fish for a bechamel-based pie like this; its firm texture, sweetness and rich shellfish characteristics shine through, even beneath the golden potato topping. The seaweed brings a level of complexity and savouriness to the pie that spinach or other gr