Free fish! How fish frames and heads are being used to their potential

Fish frames and heads are often seen dumped on beaches. Photo / Supplied

It’s not uncommon to find food thrown to waste along the beach when families nearby are going without.

But some look at a fish and only see kai in the fillets stripped from the bone.

“Is it someone being lazy or someone who doesn’t know how to utilise it,” asks Keryn Pivac, operations manager at Ngāpae Holiday Park at Waipapakauri which smokes and shares fish frames and heads.

Keryn Pivac at Ngāpae Holiday Park at Waipapakauri which smokes and shares fish frames and heads. Photo / Supplied

“The beach is our second home,” she says of Te Oneroa-a-Tōhe, the long stretch of sand inaccurately named Ninety Mile Beach. “We probably see six-to-eight frames every trip we do on a daily basis.

“Everytime I see them wasted on the beach, I think ‘oh guys, we could have had those’. It’s a terrible thing to see people wasting it because the heads and the frames go a long, long way.”

Pivac and partner Kaio Hooper live at the holiday park where she is operations manager. The park runs a manaaki freezer where donated frames and heads are stored for regular smoking.

From there, the food finds a welcome home among guests at the park. “Our goal, vision and mission is to show manaakitanga at the holiday park,” she says. “Smoked fish is a luxury, a delicacy.”

The food is also distributed to and welcomed by the wider community. And that welcome is not only those who enjoy fish as part of their diet - there are whānau whose needs are much more basic.

Signage has been developed to support the kaupapa around using the entire fish. Photo / Supplied

“A lot of people are doing it quite hard at the moment. One good-sized snapper [frame] could feed two or three people. Two good-sized snappers smoked could feed a family of five or six.”

It’s an effort that was particularly welcome during Cyclone Gabrielle when power in the area was knocked out.

The smoker was cranked up, Hooper got on the tools and the freezer emptied as food flowed. Pivac says an unknowing eye might look at a frame and think the meat was gone but once smoked, bones lift away and reveal a meal or two that would otherwise go wasted.

And smoking the heads and frames isn’t the only way. Boiling the fish skeleton - maybe with onions, carrots and a few herbs - and picking away the cooked flesh produces a great soup.

Pivac says she grew up with the concept of using the whole fish - the guts are great fertiliser for gardens.

“I think anyone who has been around their whānau, their nannies and their koros, aunties and uncles - we’ve always seen how much they love to boil their ika.

The smoker cranked up at Ngāpae Holiday Park at Waipapakauri. Photo / Supplied

“We’ve just grown up with it in the back of our minds - don’t waste your kai, this is what you can do with an entire fish, no waste at all.”

The holiday park’s kaupapa fits with its owner - Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Takoto - creating filleting stations across the rohe with signage showing how to use every part of the fish.

There is a growing movement to make better use of fish caught by recreational and commercial fishers.

The recreational fishing lobby group LegaSea helped launched and support an app that matches frames to those who want them. “It’s basically Tinder for fish heads,” says spokesman Dallas Abel.

It went further with the Kai Ika Project - in a partnership with Papatūānuku Kōkiri Marae, the Outboard Boating Club of Auckland and the NZ Sport Fishing Council - which collects fish heads and frames from commercial fishers.

Only a third of a snapper's body weight is in fillets. Smoking the frame and head can provide enough meat for a meal. Photo / Supplied

Abel said the project started with 17kg of frames in a week and was now collecting and distributing 2500kg a week. In total, it had found homes and use for 29 tonne of heads and frames.

He said on average snapper fillets made up 34 per cent of the fish weight which showed how much was usually discarded.

“The Western side of the culture don’t realise how valuable these parts of the fish are.”