This Aussie Fish Butcher Is the World's Most Creative—and Controversial—Seafood Chef

厨师乔什·尼兰德（Josh Niland）可以从鱼眼中哄骗美味。和游泳膀胱。（有趣的事实：它们像猪皮一样清脆。）甚至从鱼血中，他变成了一个精致的黑布丁，“这真是太美味了，根本没有香气。人们认为这确实超过了顶部，但比猪的血更柔和。”更重要的是，他以优雅的态度和信心灌输了一份关键领头羊的灌输：他的母亲。

Everything he puts on the plate at his 30-seat restaurantSaint Peter在Sydney, Australia，必须首先与他的母亲通过。“When I opened Saint Peter, I said we need a recipe for every single part of the fish, and we need to make it all delicious for my mother or any run-of-the-mill Australian family.”That’s how eyeballs made it on the menu. Plucked from the heads of mirror dory, they are ground into a paste, spread on large sheet pans, air dried, and baked until crunchy. They have a pleasantly savory flavor and texture akin to a fancy prawn cracker. For the 29 year-old chef, nothing is off-limits, and nothing goes to waste. Not even sperm sacs and stomachs (he cures then pan fries the former, known as milt, and uses the latter as casings for fish sausages), or the scales, which he once caramelized for a dessert at a charity event while cooking alongside Italian chef Massimo Bottura.

尼兰德不是故意自大或对抗，甚至是花哨的。这是数学的简单问题。“如果您要投入400美元的鱼，您认为可以扔235美元鱼在the bin [trash], then that’s not right.” That sentiment underscores an approach tosustainabilityand亚搏电竞食物浪费that’s as much about building a better business model for a seafood restaurant as it is about pushing the boundaries of flavor.

If the numerous accolades (2018 Chef of the Year from three Australian publications), plus bums on restaurant seats are anything to go by, customers are digging his approach to making secondary fish cuts palatable. “It’s kind of cool that offal now is exceeding the desirability of the fillet, because that was always my intention.”

这种意图在他作为厨师的成长时期的一部分受到了启发。当他17岁那年开始在悉尼的专业高端厨房工作时，其中许多人都在拥护整个野兽，他发现自己围绕着这种烹饪风格建立自己的技能。早期的几年之后，在英国进行了为期四个月的任务，在赫斯顿·布卢门塔尔（Heston Blumenthal）的《胖鸭子》（The Fat Duck）的一名笨蛋中，他主要从事厨师的食谱赫斯顿（Heston）在家中工作。尼兰德（Niland）和他的妻子朱莉（Julie）驻扎在伦敦附近，糕点厨师朱莉（Julie）发现自己在弗格斯·亨德森（Fergus Henderson）的鼻子到尾巴圣约翰（St John）经常吃饭。

尽管风格极端并置（Blumenthal的Willy Wonka风格的分子美食家，以及亨德森以内外为中心的谦卑的英国小酒馆票价庆祝活动 - 他们每个人都在各自的餐馆中都在尼兰德（Niland）完全共鸣。“我去海外尝试在我希望亲自渴望亲自的方向和食物方向和风格方面找到一些清晰度。”亚搏电竞他找到了它。

When he returned home, he ended up working at one of Sydney’s most highly regarded seafood restaurants, Fish Face, under the mentorship of chef-owner Steve Hodges. It’s here he first started experimenting with fish offal, and where the seed was planted for a method of storing, preparing, and treating fish that’s quite unlike anything else in the world.

At Saint Peter, Niland is hanging and dry aging fish in custom-built cool rooms. The fish never come into contact with any water, ice, salt or brining of any kind. When he first started doing this, the industry thought he was nuts. “People really kicked up a fuss when I opened Saint Peter because I posted a photo of myself on Instagram hanging a fish on a meat hook, and they said I was an idiot.”

但是这是尼兰德的逻辑：湿鱼是坏鱼。一旦鱼离开冰浆，在杀死后立即将其固定的任何水分都在慢慢破坏肉体并缩短其保质期。水可以在肌肉中发挥作用，或者被困在过去鳞片的口袋中，从而加快了变性。（这就是为什么厨师说的。从他最珍贵的商品中出发的保质期，以及某些鱼类（例如Albacore Tuna），三倍。餐馆中的大多数鱼在破坏之前只有几天的存储空间。这一切都可以追溯到废物，不想要的商业模式：“我认为对于鱼餐厅或鱼店来说，需要以我的方式干燥衰老，并且使用鱼类内脏是绝对必要的。”另外，他说，随着水分和脂肪含量的变化，鱼也会产生更深，更重要的风味。

Since Saint Peter opened in 2016, that approach has been so successful and the restaurant so busy, it has allowed Niland to open a second location a few doors up. Fish Butchery is a retail space that carries up to 25 under-utilized Australian fish species, as well as an extension of the dry aging facility that supplies both the restaurant and the store.

Niland’s approach to offal and dry aging—once the domain of meat-centric cooking—also extends to a playful rendering of fish as meat. The menu at Saint Peter is full of fish ‘chops’, ‘racks’, ‘ribs’ or Broadbill (swordfish) ‘steak frites’, the latter served charred on the bone with a sauce evoking a classic Béarnaise, fries and a green salad. (The Fish Butchery carries a selection of fish ‘charcuterie’—think spearfish pastrami, wild cobia pancetta, and coral trout head terrine.) Niland believes these allusions to more familiar cuts of beef, lamb, and chicken offer a familiar point of reference and makes seafood more approachable. “Fish is met with so much confrontation. I can confidently say that cooking fish kind of scares the shit out of people a lot of the time.”

对于那些不能让它尝试Nilan悉尼d’s food, you can still get a unique insight into his world through his Instagram account@mrniland(68K followers and counting), where he captures his endeavors, sometimes hauntingly visceral, other times plainly cheeky, but always beautiful and restrained, just like his cooking.