Beach holidays mean fish for dinner, writes Matt Preston.

I kid you not: as I write this piece on the perfect holiday seafood, I am sitting beside the ocean with the seagulls for mates and a fridge back at the holiday shack loaded with a freshly cooked lobster and just-caught flathead. And our freezer is bulging with calamari and prawns from warmer waters.

The cray was caught off King Island and flown to a local grass airstrip by an enterprising local, and I suspect the calamari was caught just off the beach I am watching get pounded by the relentless wild horses that crash against the shore.

For me, Australian summers – and especially Australian summer holidays, so many of which revolve around sand, sea and surf – are all about seafood. So here are the things I love about holiday seafood.

All fired up

If the Lone Ranger had Silver and Gandalf had Shadowfax, so summer seafood rides to glory on the back of shonky old barbecues in back yards around this great land. I have to admit I'd rather cook whole fish in the oven, but the grill is perfect for skewers of prawns or hoods of cleaned squid stuffed with nuts and couscous, while the flat grill is perfect for the Spanish skill of cooking "a la plancha".

Heat up the slab of iron until the olive oil is sizzling and throw on prawns in the shell, and rings of calamari with slices of chorizo and tiles of red capsicum to add porky savour and a suitable Latino lilt. The other seafood that's best done on the barbecue is welltenderised octopus, which gets almost bacon-like when grilled.

One final thing: clean the barbecue well before and after cooking seafood on it. There is nothing worse than next time ending up with a chook fillet that tastes of old mulloway.

Show your mussels

The beach is too often all about body culture, but I'd rather show you my mussels rather than my muscles.

Steam cleaned mussels in a simple French concoction of white wine, fennel and garlic, or in a more fragrant Asian broth of lemongrass and ginger.

Remove mussels from the pot as soon as they open and take the time to de-beard them then, before returning them to the sauce. I usually do this while the sauce is reducing and after I've finished it with a little cream or coconut milk respectively.

Don't forget the carbs

Seafood seems to have natural affinity with certain things: crisp green salads, a squeeze of lime and, above all, carbs.

I love prawns and calamari in my paella along with bomba rice, chorizo and chook thighs, but always add seafood near the end of cooking so it doesn't overcook. Or I'll pop shaved fennel and seared scallops on my risotto made with a light fish or vegetable stock and perhaps a splash of vermouth, pastis (anise liqueur) or ouzo.

For more robust flavours, I'll choose a fish such as ling to drop into a creamy Thai curry sauce or Indian gravy served with steamed rice.

Oh, and that lobster in the fridge will be perfect with slices of squidgy fresh white bread.

Side show

It must be my heritage, but I love a little bit on the side – especially to spark up my fish and seafood.

My favourites include horseradish or a honey mustard sauce loaded with dill for salmon or ocean trout; a rich red wine sauce for blue eye; a lime-spiked Japanese ponzu with anything fried; wasabispiked mashed avocado with seared or raw tuna; a Basquestyle puree of green herbs for clams; firm-fleshed chunky white fish and mayo; a dollop of bacon jam with calamari; or something pickled with just about anything – maybe even combined in a tartare sauce.

Above all, don't be afraid

People tell me they are more scared of cooking seafood than anything else. They shouldn't be. Seafood is the most forgiving of all proteins to cook because most of us are now used to eating raw seafood – sashimi appeals to us in a way that would appal us if it was chook. Stop stressing, buy a kitchen thermometer (or a metal skewer) to tell you when the fish or seafood is just cooked – and start cooking.

The simple fact is, the more you cook seafood, the easier it becomes.

Click here for Matt's 10 rules for cooking fish

• Follow Matt Preston on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mattscravat

Information in this article is correct as of 14 January, 2014.

Matt Preston writes for the taste section, available every Tuesday in The Courier Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and Herald Sun, every Wednesday in The Advertiser and in Perth's Sunday Times.

Source

Taste.com.au - January 2014

Author

Matt Preston

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