Collioure.

Lovely.



Monsieur McField and I, plus assorted others (one significant), spent a few very laid-back hours there.

They know about fish there.

Twas a shame to have to leave.

'twas indeed a beautiful, if rather chilly afternoon topped off with a seafood meal in one of the smallest restaurants I've ever been in





Its on my "To go back to" list.

Pah!



Try pulling your own fish out of the sea and cooking it either on the boat or the beach. Or even better, take a mackerel that's still wriggling, dispatch it then take a fillet from each side, wash it in the sea, slice and serve with soy and wasabi. One of the best fish dishes I ever ate abroad was in Greece: fresh anchovies caught and tossed straight into flour and then into hot oil, whitebait stylee



Fish of the mackerel and herring families should be eaten as fresh as possible. All others benefit from either freezing (rays & shark) or at least given some time to firm up (bass, bream, cod, flatfish).

I've been meaning to ask you something...



In June when I was in Portugal I was dined out by someone in a beachfront restaurant on a sea bass between three of us - it was huge and laying on ice on the counter when we arrived, that mornings catch apparently - so big that we couldn't eat it all.



Last Saturday I was in Morrisons, yes I already know your answer, and they were advertising sea bass and I thought I'd have a fillet, but underneath the Sea Bass sign were three pathetic little fish no bigger than a freshwater trout, in fact there were also some trout on the ice and they were the same size.



Some mistake surely ?

Maybe in Portugal you had the E Crabtree of the bass world and in Morrisons the R Burrows?

Saw someone catch a nice (bigger than supermarket, but not huge) bass yesterday on Cromer pier.

Oh, Collioure sera toujours Collioure.



An absolutely wonderful place.



Just coming to the end of our fifth successive annual summer holiday here. I suspect we already know where we'll be holidaying next summer. Somehow, the stays are getting longer and longer.

No mistake at all, the bass and bream that you see on supermarket counters are farmed in the Easter Med (Greece & Turkey usually). The minimum landing size for UK bass (THERE IS NO SUCH FOOKING THING AS SEA BASS) is 36cm, I wouldn't retain a bass of less than 45cm simply because at 36cm it hasn't reached breeding age yet. The Supermarket fish are around 25cm but they are farmed, not wild-caught and that is not only reflected in the price - line caught would be at least £15 per kilo - but also the quality. Bass are predators, they hunt hard and are not beyond eating their own, so they need to be fit. Farmed bass don't need to hunt, some bloke drops pellets (usually made from halibut) into their pens a couple of times a day. The difference is obvious when you eat them, farmed bass have fatty, flabby flesh, wild bass are all muscle.



I love it when I tell people that I batter & deep fry bass and turbot and even better when I make fishcakes from them. The look on their face is priceless.

The Bass (ok, I won't call it Sea Bass anymore, even though the Portuguese did) that I had in Portugal was at least 45 to 50cm and seemed to be cooked very simply, probably in the charcoal ovens that they had at the back of the counter, it was filleted and served at the table, huge chunks of very creamy white meat and a light accompaniment of spring potato and onion, very little else other than a sprinkling of oil, with a starter of fresh clams it was bloody gorgeous.



I didn't go for what Morrisons called "Sea Bass", instead I picked up a couple of their Thai style prawn "fishcakes" which were actually very palatable although christ knows what was inside them.

Red Mullet. Strong flavoured fish. Anyone else a fan?

Or baccala and it's various other spellings and ethnicities?



But then again, eating a brown trout in a country pub in Kent of the same name was a bit special. Caught in the river next to the pub.

Whenever buying fish remember "the eyes have it". Eyes should be bright and not sunken & dull and the gill rakes should be red or at least a deep pink. Obviously difficult with large fish they requires steaking but then use your nose: if it smells of fish, don't eat it, it should smell of the sea.



One trick used by supermarket fishmongers (especially Morrisons), is to leave whole fish on the ice until they start looking past their best. They then either simply take of the fishes' heads or fillet them, put them in a polystryrene tray with a sprig of parsley & slice of lemon and label them as "freshly prepared". Don't touch them!



You can blame Keith Floyd for making bass popular and also for the "sea" in the name. Prior to him, British housewives wouldn't even consider bass as an alternative to cod or haddock because they are scaly and bony. The only commercial market for bass was as pot bait for crab & lobster. In the US "sea bass" is actually the [url=http://archive.greenpeace.org/oceans/piratefishing/toothfish.htmlPatagonian toothfish[/url



[url=http://theitaliandishblog.com/imported-20090913150324/2009/12/5/baked-whole-fish-in-a-salt-crust-and-a-review-of-seafood-all.htmlOne of my favourite bass recipes[/url that also works with most whole fish

Not a big fan of red mullet and I would only eat salt cod that I'd caught and salted myself. I would NEVER eat that cardboard stuff you see in West Indian shops, I remember the salting process when Hull still had an inustry.



I'm also not a huge fan of trout, although wild-caught brownies are preferrable to any farmed crap