How to cook fish like a Michelin-starred chef

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.

‘You need a good non-stick pan to pan-roast a fish, that’s the first thing!’ says Gary. ‘Cast iron pans are great for some things, but not so much for fish – because you have to get them so hot for something not to stick in there, they can be a little bit too harsh for cooking fish.

‘Take a nice non-stick pan, add a tiny bit of oil then put your fish in skin-side down. It can be on a nice medium to high heat (you don’t want the harshness of a screaming hot pan) – just cook the fish gently. It only takes a few minutes to cook a nice piece of fish, and then when you flip it over you have a nice crispy skin that isn’t burnt or shrivelled up.

‘Instead of using butter to finish my fish, I have a little pot on hand with some olive oil, some smashed garlic and some thyme, and i’ll just brush that over the fish to give it some extra flavour. Take it off the heat, let it rest for thirty seconds and then serve it.’

Lots of fish suit themselves nicely to pan-roasting. Dover sole cooked on the bone in a pan is a classic choice, and cod, turbot, brill, and John Dory are all delicious pan-roasted – but Gary is a particular fan of red mullet. ‘With mullet, there’s a kind of orange oil that comes out of the skin,’ he explains. ‘I baste that over the fish whilst the skin is crisping up and then turn it over, give it a squeeze of lemon and baste that fat back over the skin.’