Wonderful alternatives to cod in these beautifully cold winter months!!

First up: the lovely haddock!

As we’ve mentioned before, we’re right in the middle of some really strong haddock year classes. And if you’re looking for a cod-family fish that won’t send the less well-informed keyboard warriors up on the barricades, haddock is the obvious choice. From time to time, we even get our hands on beautiful haddock roe – and that’s something to look forward to, because it honestly tastes almost better than cod roe. The price is also a bit more forgiving, which is never a bad thing.

Another great cod relative you can confidently jump on is tusk.

And here we owe you a small apology. The pot-caught tusk fishery unfortunately ran into trouble in mid-December, so right now we don’t have pot-caught tusk available. We hope things will pick up again soon, but it’s a brand-new fishery and new fisheries always come with challenges. The good news is that we do still get tusk from other net fisheries in the North Sea – and those you should absolutely get on board with!

A third wonderful cod-family fish is whiting!

Merlangius merlangus, as it’s beautifully called in Latin, is one of the smaller members of the cod family and is most closely related to haddock. It’s rarely very large, and you can pretty much only use size 1 fish. These typically weigh around 1–1.3 kg, which can make them a bit trickier to work with as a main-course fish – but if you’re a little creative and find the right angle, there’s a lot to gain.

Like haddock, whiting has a clear taste of mussels – but in whiting, that flavour is even more pronounced. The scales are very small and don’t sit particularly firmly, which makes it ideal for skin-on cooking. Most whiting is caught with bottom-towed gear, and we’re not interested in that. But as soon as we can get gently caught whiting, we buy it. During the colder months, there’s the best chance of sourcing whiting from low-impact fisheries – so if your curiosity is sparked, now’s the time to get going!

Not enough mussel flavour in the whiting?

Then try the rope-grown mussels instead. We’re incredibly happy that, for the third year in a row, we have rope-grown mussels available all year round – and we think you should be just as happy about that. Just a few years ago, you either had to support dredged mussel fisheries during the winter or avoid mussels altogether in the cold months. That’s no longer the case. And right now, they’re absolutely fantastic. I had them myself the other day – insanely good and beautifully plump. So go all in on those regenerative, delicious blue mussels!

Lake fish and ice – what now!?

Cold weather isn’t great news for those of us who love winter lake fish. When the lakes in Sweden freeze over, fish deliveries from there stop for a while. If winter really sets in and the frost holds, fish can return in the form of ice fishing – but only a handful of people practise that, so you can’t rely on Swedish lakes delivering the way they have up until now.

Luckily, we can still source fine zander from Estonia and the Netherlands, and we also have excellent farmed zander from Danish land-based systems. So zander should definitely stay on the menu for a good while yet!!!