Peter Dellas

I have used this book for a few years and would otherwise give it a higher score if not for my third complaint below. Firstly, this book requires you to adapt St Peter's style of kitchen and preparation for the recipes to be effective, the bulk of the recipes themselves are borderline banal otherwise. This includes maintaining a fish fridge, a dry curing room, a fish garum fermenter and a few other processes that may sound reasonable to the man whose restaurant produces these items as part of its income, but in actuality are ridiculously laborious for the average home cook. Secondly, some of the cooking tips are interesting in theory, but can be replicated with a fraction of the fuss outlined in the book. Separately poaching fish for the curry makes minimal impact to the texture of the fish and can be done, if one has enough experience, equally as well by putting the fish straight into the curry gravy for cooking. The fish weights thing is nonsense, you can gently pressure the fillets down once or twice with a spatula and still obtain the same level of doneness and crisped skin as the result depicted in the book, and the refreshing the ghee suggestion is absurd. Fish does not need to be treated with this level of complexity and precision to be prepared well at home, and only once I started disobeying the guidelines in this book and looking back towards either Japanese methods or more rustic styles of preparation did I find myself enjoying cooking fish again. Thirdly, what disgusts me is the hypocrisy in this book's claim that it is green; promoting ethically sourced fish and eliminating food waste, while simultaneously containing a recipe which calls for 12.5kg of fish to be discarded for a soup base for 6 people. Sure, the fish is stewed for the soup, which extracts a portion of its nutrients, but to strain it all away and use just the remaining liquid is absolutely horrific wastage. I imagine this would be occurring on a much larger scale at St Peter's which is even more sickening. The book is pretty, gives some interesting insight into St Peter's kitchen and presents some readable ideas. I would recommend, if you're interested in this book, in reading the first few chapters at a bookstore before returning it to the shelf.