Heads and tails

Auckland's fish market is on Jellicoe Street, just a few minutes' walk from the city centre. It's open from 6am till 7pm every day of the year. Even on Christmas Day.

If you want to make a living by selling fish in New Zealand you can bypass the country's fish quota by buying the rights. Easy? Maybe, but certainly not cheap.

Cam, who owns FISHmart, one of the two fish shops at the market, bought the quota rights for a lifetime so now he can buy and sell as much fish as he likes. I don't ask him how much this cost as I'm sure he wouldn't tell me, but suffice to say it would have cost a small fortune.

For example, he tells me, the rights for one tonne of snapper a year would set you back $50,000. That's around twenty grand. Snapper is FISHmart's best seller - they sell 200 tonnes of it a year. Salmon's a close second at around a tonne a week.

Marco "The Shark", from Siena, shows me round.

This Kingfish he's holding weighs in at over 20kg and would cost around $200 - in fact they sold a whole one this morning, he tells me.

I ask him the secret for picking the freshest fish out of a pile of hundreds. It's in the eyes, he tells me: "the eyes, they never lie." He shows me two identical snappers - only the eyes of the first one are starting to whiten softly in the middle. "That's yesterday's," he says, matter-of-factly.

Before I know it, he's whisking me round every counter, ripping off pieces of smoked fish and pressing them into my hand for me to taste. The smoked salmon heads are "little fiddly bloody things" but ideal for settling down infront of the TV with them on your lap and picking away at, he says. That's because all the flavour comes from the bones - and the meat's certainly surrounded by them.

He's right - stick your fingers right up into the inner part of the skull behind the eye sockets and pull out the moistest, meatiest flesh that's as deep in flavour as the smokiest, saltiest, most succulent bit of fish you could ever imagine. And do this while watching your favourite TV programme... I could only imagine.

Here's a grim tale, though.

This mouthy hapuka fish lives far down on the bottom of the sea bed, 200 metres deep.

When it was fished out of the depths yesterday morning, the force of the pressure caused its eyes to pop out and its tongue exploded right out of its mouth.

That's why it doesn't have a tongue anymore.

Not a nice way to die.

These long, skinny frost fish are popular with Asians, who chop them up into strips and use them in broths.


www.fishmart.co.nz