⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 4 min readThe fish arrived at the table finished with orange, not lemon. We were in La Spezia, at the southern end of Cinque Terre, deep in lemon country – the streets, the shops, the souvenir stalls all say lemon. The sauce had Taggiasca olives, pine nuts, fresh thyme, and that orange, and the combination is what…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readIt was a cool evening and the freezer has Fair Seafood tiger prawns in it – that was enough of a reason. I sautéed the shallots and garlic first, then steeped the saffron threads in warm homemade fish stock until the liquid turned a deep amber before it went near the rice. I use Ferron…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readI use steam when I want to control texture – it’s a method, like sous vide, where the environment does the work and the result is precise rather than incidental. My steam oven sets temperature only – the steam is simply how the appliance works. That single variable, temperature, is what changes the texture of…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readI’ve always thought baking gets overlooked when people talk about cooking fish. Everyone rushes to the pan-sear, chasing that restaurant-style crust and the drama of high heat. But here’s what I’ve learnt: baking is actually the most versatile way to cook fish, especially when you’re feeding more than two people or want to try different…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readThe teppanyaki plate changed how I cook fish at home. The flat surface distributes heat evenly across the whole fillet, and combined with a chef’s press held down for the full cook, the skin stays in continuous contact and renders rather than steams. There are two other reasons I come back to the teppanyaki plate…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readThis is the sauce I make when I want something that works with the fat in kingfish rather than against it. The anchovy is the decision – three fillets pressed into the oil until they dissolve completely, shifting the base from sharp to savoury before anything else goes in. The fish stock cubes do the…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 4 min readI picked up Smoky Bay oysters and spent the next few hours in the kitchen playing – which is how most of my best recipes start. I had frozen desert limes in the freezer and green finger lime pearls waiting, and I wanted to know what would happen if I let the desert lime do…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 6 min readAt a cooking demonstration at the Adelaide Central Market, I asked the audience a simple question: how many of you prefer the fish you eat in a good restaurant to the fish you cook at home? Most hands went up. The audience was seated directly opposite the community kitchen, the noise and movement of the…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readI was eleven or twelve, standing at the Rotto ferry jetty in mid-to late afternoon with half dozen bags of freshly filleted herring and a separate bag of ice to keep them cold. The day trippers were loading up for the crossing back to Perth, and we’d worked out early that departing visitors were reliably…
⏱️ Enjoy with your favourite beverage | 5 min readI’ve been thinking about how the French approach a fish market. Not the romanticised version you see on cooking shows, but the practical reality: at a good Marché, you don’t just buy fish – you have a conversation first. The vendor wants to know what you’re planning. Baking or grilling? A soup, or something to…
