“One of the great things about my job is that the college actively encourages lecturers to go and build on the knowledge we have. This development of the lecturers then adds to the knowledge we pass on to the chefs we train and eventually send out into the industry.

In my work with the Craft Guild of Chefs and the Quality Food Awards, I have had the chance to visit and work with many people in the industry. Not long ago I met Andrew Brown from Alaska Seafood. Andrew invited me and few members of the Guild to sample some of the products they produced and also to listen to the story of Alaska Seafood.

As a chef, the quality and variety of Alaska Seafood was well known to me with fish such as wild Alaskan salmon, king crab and black cod being some of the better known commodities that I had used and had a little knowledge about, but what I did not know was the fantastic story of behind the whole seafood industry in Alaska.

Sustainability has become a big buzz word within the fishing industry. Fisheries all over the world want to show that they are sustainable and that their fish stocks will last us well into the future. But most of this work has only been done recently, leaving some our fish stocks dangerously low, with fish such as cod not being as readily available in our waters as they would have been 30 or 40 years ago. Many people said that fish farming would be the answer to this problem. If you farmed a fish you do not need to take it out of the sea, so thereby making the farmed fish a sustainable option. But this even has its problems; you see, most of the fish we farm are predator fish that eat other fish so you see indirectly you are still taking fish out of the sea to feed them. So farming is not really the answer -not until we produce fish food that does not use fish.

This whole issue has led to massive changes in the way we perceive fish in this country, with everyone wanting to be seen only to use sustainable fish - and so they should. This is an important issue that needs to be addressed to safeguard future stocks.

Even large companies like Birds Eye have changed the fish they use in their fingers from cod to Pollock, and I bet you did not know that! Pollock is a similar fish from the cod family and very abundant all over the world. At the time they did this they decided to let everyone know and called the new fish fingers ‘Pollock Fish Fingers’. Unfortunately, the general public did not know what pollock was and were subsequently put off buying the new sustainable fish fingers. Sales dropped until Birds Eye re-branded the fish finger with another buzz word and now we have ‘Omega 3 Fish Fingers’. Sales went back up and our fish fingers are still sustainable pollock but nobody has noticed.

All these changes to the fishing industry happened because there is a problem with our fish stocks. This is due to a whole host of reasons, some being over fishing, the use of indiscriminate fishing gear and pressure being put on one species.

In Alaska, the fishing communities and the government were thinking about sustainability before we even thought of the word. Alaska Seafood has been a sustainable resource since 1959. Alaska recognized back then that it had natural wild resources which had been supporting human life for thousands of years. This abundance of fish and the environment they lived in needed to be protected at all costs so that it would be still there for generations to come. This was achieved by good management with each fishery being strictly regulated and closely monitored. It is this management and caring for the natural resources of their environment that should be a lesson to us all. The procedures set up by the State of Alaska should be a model our government and governments around the world use as a frame work from which to work from.

The pure clean waters of Alaska produce five species of wild salmon: king, sockeye, coho, pink and keta. The king salmon is the largest species and an average fish can weight 10kg. The pink salmon is the most abundant species and has a rosy pink colored flesh that has a fantastically mild flavour. Alaskan salmon can be found canned, fresh and smoked in some supermarkets. It has an amazingly vibrant color that is not lost even when cooked. It is great grilled and pan fried, but be warned: it needs careful cooking. Wild salmon does not have the high fat content of farmed salmon and because of this you need to understand that fish will cook more quickly and will also dry out as it has less fat to keep it moist so don’t over cook it. Alaskan wild halibut grow to incredible sizes, just the other week I was offered a 150kg fish at the college as it is a product we regularly carry. This is one of the kings of fish in my opinion and has a pure white flesh that lends itself for all sorts of cookery.

For me, the lure of using Alaskan wild fish is the fact that this is a pure wild product from a pure environment that has had very little interference from man. It is a natural product that eats natural food, lives a natural life and is then harvested for the table by people who care about our environment and its future. Alaskan wild fish to me is the game of the sea and what better food is there then wild, natural food?”