The process of trying to source responsible seafood can feel like swimming through cloudy waters. We spoke with chefs and ocean experts for some advice on where to begin, and how to make the most of the kaimoana we’re going to eat.
Since he was 4 or 5 years
Throughout his childhood, Deane travelled with his family, back and forth between Hamilton and the East Coast, making the trip to the home of his tīpuna “every long weekend, every Christmas [and] school holiday.”
In Waihau Bay, Deane learned to dive during days at sea with whānau. Time spent in the realm of Tangaroa was fun and exciting, and full of intergenerational lessons — knowledge was passed on through active learning in the sea.
“Kaitiakitanga, for example, you know guardianship of the sea, looking after people. In a way, my grandmother was teaching me that, my uncles, my aunties, my dad ... they were teaching me that. Certain rules, like we’d never dive in the same place two days in a row. So, you dive in one place, then you’d go totally somewhere else, so that area would have time to grow.”
Deane continued to maintain a connection to the ocean, diving for more than 40 years before he made it a focus of his academic pursuits. As a part of his study for the He Waka Hiringa Master of Applied Indigenous Knowledge course, Deane, and his whānau and kaumātua, facilitated a three-day-long wānanga focused on diving and gathering kaimoana in Te Tai Rāwhiti.
Fifty people from 4 years old to 70 took part in the wānanga. It was based on five interconnected principles (modelled on the five rows of a kina). Those five principles were mātauranga, manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga, tikanga and whanaungatanga. Deane’s whakapapa also informed the teachings.
The aim of the wānanga was to uplift the mana of those who participated and connect people directly to moana and whenua through te ao Māori. The response?
Deane said many started in a place of “mauri moe” — in a place of “shyness” and nervousness.
“It was surprising for me how many people had never done this sort of thing. There was a lot of gratitude and happiness. People were quite thankful.”
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Sam Woolford is the programme lead of the not-for-profit organisation LegaSea, a group that aims to raise public awareness and advocate for restoring fish stocks to greater abundance.
Sam’s work with LegaSea is focused on actioning initiatives that rally for more sustainable fisheries — LegaSea wants to see a system change that prioritises restoring seafood stocks and minimises the environmental impacts of fishing. Most recently, the non-profit advocated for the Government to completely ban trawling corridors throughout the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park.
Sam has found his own point of connection and principles in sourcing seafood. Many years ago, while hosting a guest slot on bFM, Sam half-jokingly called himself a “scavenger”. That has stuck with him.
“I will eat what I catch or what I’m given. But otherwise, I won’t buy meat. That’s the place I’ve settled and I’m comfortable with that.”
Tom Hishon, the chef behind Kingi, Daily Bread and Orphan’s Kitchen, recalls the touchpoint that invigorated the ethos of Kingi’s menu (which includes disclosure of where, how and sometimes who has sourced the food). While sourcing fish from markets, when he first opened Orphan’s Kitchen, the chef was originally drawn to bins labelled as bycatch, which sat untouched for longer periods.
But, Tom says, “after a while, the penny dropped” about the lower quality of bycatch and trawled fish.
“These fish have been thrown around the back of a net, a lot have had their scale all burnt off them from rubbing and they’re really flaccid.”
Alternatively, fish that’s been line-caught “and put straight on to ice with a lot of care and love — it’s really night and day. And you can’t go back from that, even just from a quality perspective,” he says.
As Tom’s experience would suggest, there’s a trickiness that comes with sourcing seafood for our own kitchens.
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Advertise with NZME.When we’re alienated from the source of production and are navigating a system that doesn’t prioritise conservation or implement crucial frameworks like those highlighted in Deane’s wānanga, making decisions on the kai we buy can feel overwhelming. There isn’t often clear disclosure or knowledge surrounding how and where the food has been caught (or what those labels might mean), which might leave consumers considering their options with less information than they would like.
Sam from LegaSea says there are some independent fishers he admires in this arena, who are enacting more mindful fishing methods and opting to include disclosures to their buyers.
“We’ve got people in the Marlborough Sounds who are spearfishing for butterfish, getting in the water and shooting every single fish. These guys are going above and beyond. We’ve got kina divers, who are hand-gathering kina. That’s a great one — pāua as well.”
But, another crucial and accessible aspect of enacting a mindful approach to seafood, regardless of whether we’ve bought it from supermarket shelves, picked it up from a market or sourced it from the ocean ourselves, is using as much of what we buy, or catch, as possible.
Deane made this a point of focus in the wānanga, relaying that gathering kaimoana is just “half the process”.
With the large group, he demonstrated tikanga for shelling and returning the shells of kina, drowning and preparing crayfish and taking the teeth out of pāua, along with many other processes. And, with fish, he illustrated the process of filleting, before turning the group’s attention to the rest of the fish.
“[The] fresh fish frame, we dipped in flour and then fried in butter. That’s the best fish, you can just pull the meat off the bones. But, then you would take the fish head too — my mum loves fish head soup — put it in a pot, boil it up with onions, herbs, lemons... the meat inside the fish head is beautiful too.”
Tom champions the pleasure that comes with utilising the fish head — the chef calls it “the best part”.
He notes people commonly discard this part of the fish, but it can be put to use in so many ways.
“With fish, you can do anything that you could with lamb, chicken, pork, so you can do complete nose-to-tail cooking. So, if you want to make sausages or salami or mortadella, there are ways to use the fish parts, whether it’s the meats and some of the offal to do that.”
Tom cites Australian chef Josh Niland as an influence in this space. The chef released The Whole Fish Cookbook to much acclaim in 2019. He was noted for adopting a nose-to-tail philosophy, building on the work of British chef Fergus Henderson’s work The Whole Beast (where he applied the concept to pigs).
This approach has a clear presence in Kingi’s kitchen. The menu features plenty of examples of nose-to-tail cooking methods, including the snapper head terrine and blue cod wings. Tom also featured snapper cooked five ways earlier this year, in a special serving to showcase Kingi’s new chef-grade chopping boards made from fishing nets and post-consumer plastics produced in collaboration with LegaSea and recycling startup Critical.
He looks to some simpler techniques too, which he feels are finding a broader audience through greater distribution of cooking skills and knowledge.
“I think people have more knowledge now around cooking techniques and there’s a lot of information and recipes out there. It’s quite easy to turn a head into a terrine, or a fish stock, or a sauce, or roast it whole in a woodfired oven.”
Of course, while exciting and energising, nose-to-tail cooking is not a new cooking method — it’s one that has been thoroughly examined and practised within many other communities and cultures all over the world.
Recent dishes and recipes from influential authors in Aotearoa have relayed these methods and showcased some of the existing practices of full utilisation.
It’s a staple in the kitchen at Cocoro, the Japanese degustation restaurant in Ponsonby, where chef Makoto Tokuyama serves up snapper arani, which sees snapper head and wings submerged in a sweet and salty broth.
Full utilisation is ever-present in Monique Fiso’s fantastic cookbook Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine, which makes use of a huge range of oft-discarded parts. Mussel stock and reserved cooking juices are put to work in a moemoe vichyssoise, with kuku icecream. A recipe for kina panna cotta, smoked warehou and kuku makes use of the kina itself and the juice it’s commonly sold in. A fried ika collar sees the fish wings served with a dramatic flourish. Fish bones are utilised in broths, while fish skins are saved to make crumbs.
Sam Low’s recent release Modern Chinese features a recipe for steamed blue cod, cooked whole in an aromatic mix of soy sauce, rice wine, spring onions, black bean and ginger. He also relays the wider cultural meaning he sees enmeshed with the dish, as it is cooked this way for a celebratory meal and is symbolic of ‘the entirety’.
Matt Watson, the “mad fisherman” who has been a staple figure of New Zealand-based fishing television shows, has also shared a recipe for baked fish heads, simply pairing them with olive oil, lemon and red onion. The fisherman endorses the practice, “because instead of taking six snapper to feed your family with the fillets, you could eat the whole fish and you only need to take three — that’s got to be good, doesn’t it?”
Matt shares this recipe with Kai Ika, another LegaSea initiative seeking to encourage full utilisation across communities in Aotearoa. In collaboration with the Outboard Boating Club of Auckland and the Papatūānuku Kōkiri Marae, Kai Ika offers recreational fishers a filleting service. The initiative collects the fish parts that will go unused, such as heads, frames or offal. Then, the service redistributes and donates the food to people who will make use of them.
Sam says Kai Ika is about creating greater food security and community resilience. Since the project started in South Auckland in 2016, with just 17kg of fish, it’s seen huge growth. Now, he says, Kai Ika is averaging 2000kg a week in Tāmaki Makaurau and about 500kg in a satellite office in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
The demand has led LegaSea to establish an app, called Free Fish Heads, so that fishers and consumers can connect more directly in areas where filleting services aren’t available. Aside from this implementation, Sam also hopes the project fosters an attitude and cultural shift in our perceptions of eating these parts of the fish.
“If we can change perceptions and behaviours, and people start eating the fish heads and frames, then actually people will start catching less. Because they will recognise that the whole fish is food.”
He says if we’re able to go beyond taking just the fillets off, and see the heads and frames as valuable sustenance, we’ll be starting to make the right connections.
“Maximum utilisation is conservation. And that’s what we’re advocating for. Eat the whole fish.”
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