I’ve been thinking about how the French approach a fish market. Not the romanticised version you see on cooking shows – the practical reality: at a good Marché, you don’t just buy fish. You have a conversation first. The vendor wants to know what you’re planning. Baking or grilling? A soup, or something to pan-sear quickly on a Tuesday night? The answer changes everything they’ll recommend. It isn’t theatre. It’s simply the logical sequence: decide the destination, then choose the vehicle.
We don’t do this in Australia. Most of us arrive at the fish counter with a general intention – seafood tonight – and leave with whatever looked appealing in the display. The fish makes the journey home without context. And then we wonder why it disappointed us.
I’ve been working with Fair Seafood on a guideline that maps nine distinct cooking styles across six cuisine traditions with the species best suited to each. It’s a reference document, not a rulebook – guidelines are exactly that, and the best cooking always involves reading what’s in front of you, not following a chart. But laid out in full, what strikes me isn’t the complexity. It’s how clarifying it becomes the moment you ask the right first question before you shop. If you’d like a copy of the guideline, ask the team at Fair Seafood.
“The question isn’t ‘what looks fresh?’ It’s ‘what am I actually cooking tonight?’”
Nine Ways to Cook Fish – And Why It Matters
A pan sear is a different conversation from a braise. Shallow frying through a light flour dusting – the Mediterranean fritto misto approach – creates textures impossible to achieve through baking. Steam cooking extracts different qualities from the same fish than a barbecue would. These aren’t interchangeable methods. Each one calls for different species, different textures, different preparation entirely.
The guideline maps this across pan searing, baking and roasting, poaching and steaming, deep and shallow frying, barbecue and charcoal, braising and curries, stir-frying, curing and raw preparations, and sautéing for pastas and risottos. Nine pathways. Each with its own species logic. And each one, as I’ve been exploring in my journal series, deserves its own dedicated attention.
Pan searing rewards species that can handle high, direct heat with a skin worth crisping – barramundi, King George whiting, coral trout, or Ōra King salmon with its beautiful fat content. Take that same piece of flathead and bake it whole with Mediterranean aromatics and you’re in entirely different territory: gentle, even heat rewards the delicate flesh in ways a hot pan would destroy. I’ve written about both in detail – the pan sear and the gentle art of baking fish – and the differences between them matter more than most home cooks realise.
Barbecue and charcoal opens another register again. Mulloway on the grill has that primal quality – smoke working with the fish’s natural oils – that neither oven nor stove can replicate. Whole sardines, Australian salmon, southern garfish on direct heat: these aren’t compromised versions of proper cooking. They’re the right tool for the right job.
Then there’s braising and curries – a method that requires species with enough structural integrity to hold together through extended liquid cooking. Ling, nannygai, leatherjacket, yellowtail kingfish. These fish can absorb and carry bold aromatics without surrendering. Drop sand whiting or flathead into a long braise and you’ll lose the fish entirely. Does it make sense? Yes or no, not a maybe.
The Cuisine Question Matters as Much as the Method
Here’s where it becomes genuinely interesting. The same cooking technique produces completely different results depending on the cuisine tradition shaping it.
Take poaching and steaming. A Japanese dashi-poached King George whiting sitting in a clean, restrained broth is a study in precision – the fish’s delicacy amplified, nothing competing with it. The same method applied through South Asian logic – aromatic spices, curry leaves, turmeric, tamarind, coconut milk building in careful sequence – creates something entirely different from the same technique applied to the same species. I experienced this first-hand in Chennai, and it reshaped how I think about liquid cooking entirely. Both are valid. Neither is more correct than the other.
The guideline pairs each cooking style with six cuisine traditions: Japanese, South Asian, Thai, Chinese, North African, and Mediterranean. These aren’t arbitrary groupings – they reflect genuinely different philosophies about what fish should taste like and what role it plays in a meal. A North African preparation of flathead – chermoula, preserved lemon, oven-roasted whole – bears almost no resemblance to the same species in a Thai stir-fry with galangal, fish sauce, and fresh herbs, even though both are valid and both are delicious.
Knowing which tradition is guiding your hand changes which species you reach for, which cut makes sense, and which technique serves the purpose. Stir-frying through a Chinese lens rewards barramundi, golden perch, or coral trout – firm enough to handle wok heat without breaking, mild enough to carry the aromatics cleanly. Curing and raw preparation, whether Japanese sashimi or Nordic gravlax, calls for Ōra King salmon, barramundi, or yellowtail kingfish – species with the fat content and texture that reward minimal intervention.
The Fair Seafood team can tell you what came in this morning, when each fish was caught, and which species suit exactly what you’re planning to cook. That conversation is the whole point of shopping here.
The Season Nobody Asks About
There’s a fourth question that rarely gets asked at all, and it might be the most important one. What’s actually good right now?
We’ve grown so accustomed to year-round availability – the same species in the same display regardless of what month it is – that we’ve largely lost the instinct to ask about season. But fish, like any honest ingredient, has rhythms. Southern garfish running beautifully through winter. King George whiting at their best through the warmer months. Coorong mullet carrying the story of the Murray-Darling system in their flesh, at their peak when the estuary conditions are right. These aren’t abstract fishing industry details – they’re the difference between a species at its absolute best and one that’s technically available but not at its finest.
The seasonal question changes the entire frame. Instead of arriving at the counter with a species already decided, you arrive with a method and a cuisine tradition in mind – and ask what’s best right now that would suit them. It’s the same logic the French market vendor applies instinctively. It’s also how you end up cooking species you’d never have reached for otherwise: the garfish you hadn’t considered, the tommy ruff that’s been running beautifully, the piece of leatherjacket from a South Australian fisher that came in yesterday.
Fair Seafood’s model – caught yesterday, filleted today, available to you tomorrow — only makes sense if you’re willing to let what’s genuinely fresh guide the choice, not the other way around. That 100% fisher-to-consumer traceability means you can see exactly where your fish was caught, when, and by whom. That connects you directly to the fisher and the season, which is as close as most of us get to that marché conversation.
Seasonal availability is also a sustainability argument, though it doesn’t need to be framed that way to be compelling. When a species is abundant and in season, it’s also at its eating best and its most responsibly harvested. The questions align. Ask what’s seasonal and you’re also asking what’s sustainable, what’s fresh, and what the team at Fair Seafood is genuinely excited about right now. That enthusiasm is information worth having.
The Texture Conversation
The guideline organises species across four texture categories, from flaky and delicate through to medium-firm. This matters more than most home cooks realise. It’s not just about which fish is ‘better’ – it’s about which fish serves the technique you’ve chosen.
At the delicate end: sardines, sand whiting, snook, Ōra King salmon. These species reward restraint – gentle heat, minimal intervention, simple finishes with good olive oil or cultured butter and citrus. At the medium-firm end: Murray cod, nannygai, samson fish, yellowtail kingfish, red and pink snapper. These can handle – and in fact need – more assertive treatment: aggressive searing, long braising, bold sauces that would overwhelm their more delicate cousins.
Coral trout, flathead, Australian salmon, and redfin perch sit in the middle range. Versatile enough to move across most cooking styles, but still responding differently depending on what you ask of them. Knowing where a species sits in this texture spectrum changes both what you cook and how you cook it. It’s a thread I return to across the journal series, because it underpins every technique.
The Conversation That Changes Everything
Coming back to that French market logic: the sequence matters. Method first, then cuisine tradition, then species selection based on texture and what’s available today. What am I cooking tonight? Thai? South Asian? Mediterranean? Pan sear or barbecue? A quick Tuesday-night stir-fry or a slow weekend curry with time to let the aromatics build properly?
These aren’t complicated questions. They take thirty seconds to answer before you leave the house. But they transform you from someone buying fish blind into someone having a conversation at the Fair Seafood counter that actually leads somewhere. The team know the species, the catch, the season, the texture. They know what came in this morning. Give them the context – the cooking style, the cuisine tradition, the occasion – and they can guide you to exactly what the dish needs. Without supporting local there will be no local, and the providores who carry this knowledge are as important to the plate as any technique I can share.
I remain convinced that by staying curious and open-minded; by showing a willingness to ask better questions and move beyond your comfort zone, you’ll improve the chances of understanding what you’re actually trying to achieve in the kitchen. The fish isn’t disappointing you. The question you’re not asking is.
Lean in. The learning is in the doing – and the doing starts before you even pick up the fish. The guideline is a starting point. This journal series is where it comes to life. Watch this space.
The cooking style and cuisine guideline is available – ask the team at Fair Seafood. Each technique covered in the guideline is being explored in depth through the AncientGrains63 journal series. Follow along at AncientGrains63 as each article unpacks a different method, species, and the stories that meet the plate.
Which cooking style do you find yourself returning to most? Have you tried mapping cuisine tradition to species before you shop? I’d love to hear what questions you’ve started asking at the counter.
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