The least popular eating fish tend to also be the most sustainable. But the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive if you know what to do with them.
This is an excerpt from our food newsletter, The Boil Up.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about fish. Fresh fish, tinned fish, raw fish, fish stock, fish curry, fish frames, fish and chips. It’s something I love to order at a restaurant (a hāpuku steak cooked well is hard to beat) and to cook at home, especially oven-steaming salmon in little baking paper parcels with mushrooms, spring onions and a miso dressing, using trevally in a fragrant Goan curry or making the most of fresh sardines whenever I see them and making one of my favourite Sicilian dishes, pasta con le sarde.
The thing is that while experts recommend eating fish at least twice a week (especially oily fish), when I look at the best fish guide for sustainably caught kaimoana, it doesn’t correlate to much of what I see in the shops and information about where and how the fish was gathered can be hard to come by. Waters become murkier still when I read about mercury and microplastics, the horrors or deep sea trawling, and deformed farmed salmon swimming blind, their sea-lice riddled flesh made pink via dye-laden feed.
A few weeks ago, I went along to a session as part of the AUT Culinary Arts and Gastronomy Winter Series in which chef Gaby Levionnois of the Pacific Food Lab New Caledonia spoke about his vision for a sustainable Pacific food system and demonstrated a simple recipe using kahawai, a beautiful, fatty fish you’ve probably eaten a lot of if you dabble in fishing, less so if you’re a more standard consumer like me – although you might have come across it in smoked form, something often done with less desirable fish to increase their marketability. Despite being the second most commonly-caught species in Aotearoa (after snapper), kahawai hasn’t been a popular market fish here, perhaps because they are so common, or because they are seen as having too much blood (we prefer pure white fish meat).
This unpopularity is part of what makes kahawai a sustainable choice, as opposed to, say, kingfish or tuna, which are in high demand, but it is also because they are a fast-growing species with a high fertility rate, always replenishing their own population. Levionnois tells us that his aim is to promote the fish, to use his skills as a chef to show the value of local ingredients such as kahawai and hopefully push them forward into our local kai culture. On this day, he does so by demonstrating its use in an astonishingly easy raw dish, which he begins with a dry brine; rubbing the kahawai fillets with a mixture of white sugar and salt before letting it rest in the fridge for 25 minutes. When the time is up, he rinses the brine off and gently pats the fillets dry, then starts slicing them finely, like sashimi, arranging them in a single layer on the plate, finishing the dish by spooning over generous amounts of a simple dressing made from fennel fronds, marinated green peppercorns and lemon.
Not long after the demo, while researching the best fishmongers in Tāmaki (a compulsion), I learn that Kiwi Fish – an operation serviced by local fishermen offering their sustainably caught local kaimoana to restaurants, hotels and superyachts – has a shopfront in industrial-ish Mt Roskill, just across from my fave Mug’n’Bowl (great bánh mì). As fate would have it, on my first visit, a bundle of kahawai have just been brought in. Their eyes were bright and clear, their scales a bluish silver with dark spots and blooms of turmeric around the fins. I select a fat one and bring it to the bench for filleting, where a man in a diaphanous disposable apron expertly separates dark pink flesh from spiky spine, wielding his cutthroat knife like an extension of his arm.
Chatting with the woman at the counter as she wraps up my fish, I learn about another way to eat kahawai. “Mostly Filipino customers like this one,” she told me, “they do a raw fish dish too, with chilli and lime, lots of strong flavours.” I search this later and read about kinilaw, a ceviche-style dish that uses coconut or cane vinegar as the main denaturing ingredient (ceviche differs to crudo or sashimi in that it employs acid in the marinade to sort of “cook” the fish, changing the texture to something slightly firmer) alongside various sour ingredients (think calamansi, dayap (key lime), green mangoes, tamarind) and spices. This great video shows the entire cooking process – using kahawai, even!
Later that evening, when I open my parcel to begin dry brining my kahawai, I realise that the fish head and frame are missing. I had forgotten you need to ask to keep these; my usual fishmonger already knows I like them – how else will I make the silky, nutrient-dense fish stock that forms the basis of my seafood chowder, my cioppino, the paella I always intend to make but never do?
As it turns out, I’m not the only one who likes to utilise every part of a fish. This week, I learned about Kai Ika, a collaborative project between Papatūānuku Kōkiri Marae and commercial fisheries, who collect the discarded fish parts from commercial and recreational fishers as well as Woolworths and distribute them – for free – at Centre Park in Māngere every Wednesday and Friday, fighting food waste and food insecurity at the same time.
Which brings me back to my quandary, the never-ending question of how to eat sustainably, healthfully and affordably – a question that is in itself a symptom of a broken food system, one that assumes you don’t want the whole fish, that throws half the kai away when there are people going hungry. Describing Kai Ika, Carlos Hotene, the Kai Auaha Rangatahi of Papatūānuku Kōkiri Marae, says: “We respect the fish. That’s what it’s all about. We respect it by eating all of the parts.”
It sounds like the simplest thing in the world, and yet when we buy kai, there are so many concerns to hold in your head at once. But perhaps this is the best one to remember, because really, don’t they all boil down to respect? Respect for the kai itself, for the planet and all who live here, and lastly, for ourselves.