FISH & CHIPS Sweet Seafood

SWEET SEAFOOD: The Top Trends in Kiwi Seafood Cuisine

While classic fish and chips is a beloved dish, Kiwi consumers are experimenting more with their taste-buds and are looking for something new and unique from their dining experiences.

Keeping classics on the menu is important, but it’s also important to have fun and innovate to keep things fresh, why not try some of these top Kiwi seafood cuisine trends on your fish and chip menu.

Aged Fish

When aged, the flesh of many fish, and especially oily fish, will develop more complex flavours, often in the savoury profile. For sashimi and curing, oily fish allowed to age will often produce stunning flavours.

Top fish to age are kahawai, trumpeter and groper but the technique can be trialled with all fish types. Kingi, a popular Auckland seafood restaurant, serves aged kahawai. They hang it in their chiller before eventually serving it raw.

Using the Whole Fish

Not only is using the whole fish a good way to maximise the resource, but you will also get a greater range of flavours. Fish heads, for example, have a lot of flavourful oils in them and some big chunks of flesh and split and smoked fish heads make a great finger food, but be sure to serve with plenty of napkins.

In restaurants the use of fish collars has become quite popular as they can be eaten like chicken wings, another great finger food full of flavour.

The Use of Coastal Succulents

Foraging is increasing in popularity and customers like a menu built on locally sourced ingredients.

You get fresh flavours and often high levels of nutrition from wild foraged herbs and coastal succulents (such as ice-plants). Many are used as garnishes with seafood or make a tasty side salad.

Key coastal herbs to use are wild fennel, Italian parsley and native celery. Beach spinach and native spinach often grow wild along our coast too and have a stunning salty flavour with a crisp texture. Native ice plant (horokaka) is also very nice as a wild succulent to add into salads with seafood and it can also be pickled in vinegar to enhance its flavour.

Seaweeds for Flavour

We are lucky to have a diverse range of edible seaweeds in New Zealand waters. The top five edible seaweeds are wakame, kombu (Ecklonia radiata), sea lettuce, karengo and in some areas for those that dive, sea grapes.

Many of the seaweeds are ideal to lightly blanch and mix in together with sesame oil and seeds to make a seaweed salad. While brown in colour when fresh, seaweeds will go a vibrant bright green colour when heated up.

FRESHENING UP YOUR MENU? TOO EASY.

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