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Fine Art meets Fine Dining
Langoustines
Colour is key to the chef, who gained a degree in Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art and whose parents are both artists.
“My food is inspired by the colours in ingredients and I enjoy using vegetables to complement the natural hues of the fish. Colour is as important as anything else and is often the starting point for me,” she says.
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Rosie Healey, who trained with Yotam Ottolenghi in London and opened her acclaimed popular restaurant Alchemilla on Glasgow’s fashionable Finnieston Strip in 2016, has had at least four seafood dishes on her menu since the start – and notonly to balance the four meat and game ones.
“We always have at least four seafood dishes on, because Scotland has so much fantastic fish that should be used here at home,” she says. “But it’s also there because I like working with it and absolutely love eating it.”
She prefers using less familiar locally-sourced species such mackerel, squid, herring and sardines.
Her grilled mackerel dish is beautifully paired with tomato and sumac, pickled herring with potatoes and carrots, hake with pangrattato, smoked haddock carpaccio with pickled red peppers, in visually appealing creations that look simple but which take time and care to perfect and which, she hopes, prove to be deliciously complex in flavour.
“I don’t do puffs, gels, foams, ices or water baths,” she adds. “To me, that kind of cooking is more about showing off the chef than what’s delicious to eat – which is fresh, vibrant and seasonal.”
While working at Ottolenghi’s Notting Hill branch, she contributed to the menu on several occasions and the celebrity chef even tweeted pictures of her dishes.
Through that experience she says she gained confidence and learned that cooking does not have to involve lots of techniques in order to be delicious.
“Fresh Scottish seafood is a prime example of that,” she adds. “It is so delicious in itself that I like to use vegetables and other plants to showcase its natural beauty and complement its delicious flavours.”
Meet the next generation
Mallaig-based Allan Peter Cameron is currently more than 40 miles off the West Coast of Scotland in his 18-metre twin rig trawler the Sparkling Star, and will spend the week at sea fishing mainly for megrim and monkfish.
He and his crew will go 90 miles up to the west of Shetland and north-west Scrabster, landing around four to five tonnes a week.
Fierce looking Beasts
Monkfish are Allan’s
favourite catch
Landing huge North Sea monkfish south-east of Shetland is one of Allan’s personal highlights.
“They’re huge, pretty fierce looking beasts and to me the most interesting,” he says. “When we caught our first one, I lifted it up and its mouth was at the top of my chest and its tail was still on the deck. They are amazing, and the only fish that will get me out of the wheeler’s seat!”
Stephen Buchan of Peterhead
Fish Company shows off 25kg
catfish at Peterhead
marketplace
In the next month or so they will base themselves at Scrabster and from there go to Fraserburgh and Eyemouth, returning to Scrabster in time for Christmas.
Allan, 31, joined the industry on leaving school 14 years ago. He started out with langoustine but decided to concentrate on whitefish last September and bought a bigger steel boat, equipped with superfast wifi, to enable him to go further out to sea for longer periods of time while staying in touch with weather forecasts, family and Facebook.
His catch goes directly to Peterhead market.
“We’re fishing 24 hours a day and don’t stop, even through the dark hours,” he says. “We haul and shoot every five hours until we’re full up.”
He reckons the job is a “great, honest living” where it’s possible to earn a substantial salary.
On the day we spoke, the crew had shot at 4.10am and hauled at 9.10am for around a solid 25 minutes. After a big breakfast they would haul again at 2pm, and continue that five-hour pattern through 24 hours.
Despite being out to sea for days on-end eating well onboard the Sparkling Star isn’t a challenge “the crew love fish and if they catch a nice turbot they are at their happiest. They’ll skin and bake it and really enjoy it,” explains Allan.
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