Take One Fish Cookbook Review

Take One Fish: The New School of Scale-to-Tail Cooking and Eating

After the success of The Whole Fish Cookbook, the James award-winning chef Josh Niland is back with Take One Fish Cookbook.

Forget everything you thought you knew about fish cookery with Take One Fish. There are no rules when it comes to cooking fish according to Josh, only an endless world of possibilities. With 60 mind-blowing recipes from just 15 global varieties of fish, this cookbook will take you on a gustatory journey – from elaborate to easy, small to large and – always – scale to tail.

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Following the Success of The Whole Fish Cookbook

Josh’s multi-award-winning and bestselling book, The Whole Fish Cookbook, revealed the blueprint for a new and unprecedented kind of fish cookery. In Take One Fish, Josh continues to open our eyes to the potential of fish in the kitchen, starting from the moment we take our fish home and unpack it.

With flair, color, and bucket loads of flavor, Take One Fish unpacks each of Josh's 15 fish to reveal their true culinary potential, from Swordfish Cotoletta to Pot au Feu, to Tuna Mapo Tofu to an ethereal Raw Flounder. Celebrate the drips, crunchy bits, burnt edges, and imperfections that are so central to Josh’s mission – to get more people having fun with fish ingenuity every day.

This new book builds on Whole Fish Cookbook, in a way that he describes as more 'joyful' and accessible. While with Whole Fish Cookbook Josh wanted chefs to rethink carcass utilization and generally change their approach to fish butchery, with Take One Fish his aim seems to be to show how interchangeable meat and fish can actually be.

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Rethink the Way We Eat

‍Take One Fish is a further demonstration of Josh's passionate belief that we need to think about cooking and eating fish. Right now, says Josh, approximately 50 percent of all fish just goes to waste. “I’m not suggesting you go and eat the eyeballs out of every fish you buy at the shops, but this conversation is urgent: it’s past time to question the normalization of half a fish going into the bin."

Take One Fish will take almost every one of their comfort zone. Josh serves as an inspiring teacher gently encouraging everyone to cook parts of the fish we would probably never even consider. Like in the previous book, there is no point denying that many recipes require access to fish more easily available in native Australia. However, Josh provides alternatives, using the recipes as a framework for locally available fish.

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Final Thoughts

Take One Fish is a book for professional chefs and adventurous home cooks that want to learn new ways to cook fish. For those interested in food and cooking generally, and fish and sustainability in particular, this is a book that will catch your imagination and truly inspire you. For those of us in this category, it is essential reading.

Not everyone will want to have a dehydrator full of snapper’s swim bladders or mason jars of heads, bones, and scraps fermenting into garum but Take One Fish is so packed full of delicious, different, and doable ideas that no serious cook should be without a copy.