Sustainable fish

Using local and sustainable fish is important and a big focus at the restaurant

It can be a bit hard sometimes to get people to eat the lesser known fish, everyone loves the high rollers like bass, turbot, sole even john dory.

Why are the lower end fish not so popular? Is it because the celebrity chefs don't use them as much? When Mr Ramsey used pollock at one restaurant in Brighton everyone started using it and the price jumped from £4-5 pounds per kg to around £9,50 per kg and pollock is now as popular as mackerel.

I went to a food show in London with the family a few months ago and there was two lads cooking with gurnard, horse mackerel and wrasse.

Gurnard I think is the more well known of the three, it is a nice fish and we have used it for a while at the restaurant.

Horse mackerel was a new one for me until a few months before, one of the chefs was talking about it so I asked my supplier who said they mostly use it for bait. It is nothing like mackerel but still a good fish, a little bony though.

And then there was wrasse I had never used before and I loved, looks like a snapper and the flesh is a bit like red mullet. 

Pan roast wrasse with lobster, wild pea, saffron potatoes 

Cure

Home curing is something I am really getting in to at the moment, lots of experimenting going on, here are a few things we are working on right now

Duck ham - One of my chefs Sam is a master with this, he makes a great take on "ham, egg and chips"

Salt the breasts with liquorice and star anis cure for five days then rinse with cold water, pat dry, brush with duck fat and dust with ground white pepper. Wrap in muslin and hang for five weeks or so.



Pollock pastrami - Pollock is a great meaty fish to use and its local and sustainable

Cure the fish with salt and sugar for a few days then rinse, pat dry and sprinkle with a mixture of crushed coriander seeds, mustard seeds and a little coarse black pepper.

You could also finish the pollock after the cure with a gravadlax style dressing mustard, sugar, pinch white pepper, chopped dill and olive oil.



Dry cured ham - This one takes much longer at least eight months and up to a few years I believe.

This one is still in the making we cured it for four days for every 500 grams which worked out about 28 days. We still have a few months left to hang this puppy but I will keep you posted.



Bresaola - We got half a cow in the other day and butchered it in house, we were trying to come up with some other ideas other than the main cuts and mince

Again this one has just started, now you can read a lot of different ways to do this but I thought i would keep it simple - salt, rosemary, thyme, garlic and red wine.

I love the idea of having a whole carcase meat or fish spending a bit of time salting/curing and then having something at the end of it all that tastes amazing. That is what it is all about.



If anyone wants to know the recipes I used send me an email.

Photography by Carla Grassy