Fish tales
Sydney-based chef and restaurateur Josh Niland talks to ELLA WALKER about fin-to-gill eating and the benefits of fish butchery
CHEF Josh Niland can be brilliantly blunt. “If you write a vanilla cookbook that just puts another fillet on top of another vegetable, I think I’ll go crazy,” he says over Zoom from Sydney, Australia. “It’s so boring, the way we continue to see fish.”
The restaurateur and fish butcher is doggedly trying to revolutionise the fish business.
He has developed a whole new fin-to-gill ethos to keep us eating fish in a sustainable way and isn’t afraid to make statements like: “It’s no longer acceptable to be serving AUS$12 (£7) fish and chips at a local fish and chipper.”
He set out his stall in his hugely successful debut, The Whole Fish Cookbook, for which he picked up two prestigious James Beard Awards and sold a whopping 100,000 copies.
In it, he outlined fish butchery as an opportunity to make the most of every fish we buy, cook and eat. Sydney is back in lockdown when we speak, so Josh’s restaurant, Saint Peter, has had to quickly re-pivot to at-home dining (again), but he’s found that home cooking has ramped up wider interest in fish butchery.
“For a lot of people using a fish shop, there’s never really much vocabulary beyond, ‘I’ll have that one’, or, ‘What would you want to eat?”’ says New South Wales-born Josh, but encouragingly he’s had people increasingly “asking us to do certain tasks for them.”
His latest cookbook, Take One Fish, demonstrates the benefits of fish butchery for home cooks, and for seeing every fish as more than its fillets.
He considers the potential of 15 diverse fish species and looks at the maths: “If I can generate the yield of two fish from one single fish, that means one less fish gets taken out of the water.”
Josh calls the book “an indirect message of sustainability and making better decisions” – done in a way that’s as “provocative and humorous” as possible, hence the witty, graphic photography, bold tone and galvanising recipes.
It’s a step on from The Whole Fish Cookbook, which Josh admits is “quite exhaustive”, with its recipes for fish offal and charcuterie. With Take One Fish, he hopes to “offer tangible solutions for a protein” that is quite difficult to a lot of people.
There’s a big crumbed swordfish cutlet “that wouldn’t be out of place on a pub menu anywhere in the UK”, and tuna mince made using the less desirable cuts.
“What’s happening to the rest of that fish?” says Josh. “To me, coming up with a solution in the form of a tuna mince was really exciting and very obvious. All of a sudden we’ve got lasagne, koftas, mapo tofu (to make). It’s a wonderful way to introduce children experiencing fish for the first time.”
He reckons the tuna chapter in particular will really resonate and “bring more comfort to the idea of cooking fish”.
And change is absolutely necessary. “Every month that goes by, it becomes more and more of an issue,” says Josh, of the environmental crisis.
From a culinary perspective, he says “the message I’m trying to project is, where we live in a privileged country, like Australia, the UK and the US, where we have the privilege of choice, where we can make decisions around the food we want to eat, then we need to be making better decisions.”
Josh’s fish butchery uses every aspect of fish in a way that will attract Western audiences, who likely “wouldn’t sit down to a bowl of eyeballs nor fish sperm”.
For example, his decadent custard tart with sardine garum caramel.
“You’ve got to keep pushing buttons, otherwise nobody pays attention,” he grins. Once he explains that he’s drawing on Thai cooking, where fish sauce is used to offset the bitterness of caramel, the tart doesn’t sound so bizarre.
“I try to join the dots and thread the needle to help people understand how I got to that outcome,” says Josh. “But ultimately, I just want to prod and poke people.”
He adds: “I feel that I’m at the beginning of a journey that is going to take a very long time.
“But [it’s a conversation] I feel is extremely necessary, if we are going to see about doing any kind of real change that can help the oceans.”
Take One Fish: The New School Of Scale-to-Tail Cooking And Eating by Josh Niland is out now, priced
£26.
You’ve got to keep pushing buttons or no-one pays attention