When a recently returned friend from Canada offered us some halibut for our dinner, I jumped at the chance to reunite my taste buds with this piscatorial delight. While halibut look like our flounder on steroids, the flesh although very white is quite different in texture – somewhere between snapper and kingfish. And like kingfish, it is best not over-cooked. It is a firm flesh which makes it ideal for dicing up for curries and cut into even smaller pieces for the dumpling/ money bags recipe in this month’s Sea to Sizzle. While halibut are a northern hemisphere fish, snapper and kingfish can be substituted for the recipes.

They are a great fish to catch and are very strong fighters. The charters we have fished with in Canada all carry a harpoon to deal with the bigger fish as they can be a handful boatside and once landed. There is something of an urban myth surrounding the species where a Texan client fishing on a charter caught an XOS halibut that went nuts when hauled into the cockpit. The Texan pulled out his side arm and shot it, putting a hole in the hull in the process!

Halibut are an interesting and easy fish to fillet, you can check the process out on YouTube.

Getting them home is not an issue. In this instance, the fish had been professionally processed, vacuum-packed packed and blastfrozen before being packed in a chilly box and then waterproof cardboard box for the trek home.

There are no issues getting saltwater fish home provided it is adequately packed. The last thing the airline wants is fish blood and guts through the hold, contaminating other passengers’ luggage! You will most likely have the fish inspected by customs, but once again, no issues with importing saltwater species – it is freshwater fish that raise alarms.