A Thought on Cooking Fish

No matter how you decide to cook your fish you need to remember one thing: when you remove your fish from the heat source it continues to cook. If the fish is cooked perfectly in the pan or oven, then you will have sadly overcooked it by the time you start to eat it. Think residual heat: the hotter your cooking method the more the fish will cook on resting. There is a game you can play in your mind: the fish is cooking, and as it cooks the heat will penetrate from both sides and meet in the middle (even if cooking one side at a time). Now, as the ‘doneness’ of the fish is indicated by the heat meeting in the middle of the fish, the fish needs to be removed from the heat when it is three-quarters of the way cooked through on each side. Imagine: as the waiter picks up the fish the two sides are getting closer and closer, as the waiter puts it down they are starting to join, and as the customer plunges the fork into the fish they meet, with just enough heat for them to join. I get my staff to visualize the gentle embrace of the two sides at the moment of being perfectly cooked. The important thing is to really get a sense for what you think would be perfect. Tiger Woods imagines every ball before he plays it, and most times it goes where he wants. It’s time for you to concentrate on perfect fish cookery. May the force be with you!