Ask almost any chef and they’ll tell you – fish cooking is one of the toughest things to master. Take it out of the pan a tiny bit too early and the insides will be jelly. Leave it in the pan too long, and the delicate, flaky flesh starts to go mushy, and your skin goes from crispy to just plain burnt. Cooking fish like a professional chef requires a lot of things, but most important among them is experience, says Gary Foulkes – executive chef at Michelin-starred fish and seafood restaurant Angler.
‘Cooking fish is one of those things – the more you do it the better you become at it,’ says Gary, who spent many years as both sous chef and head chef with Phil Howard at The Square before taking over the kitchen at Angler. ‘There are so many different avenues you can go down. A lot of cooking fish is down to touch and timing and experience, but there are some useful things to look out for.’ Thankfully, Gary was on hand to break things down for us, starting with a classic pan-roast.