Fallow's Famous Cod’s Head

How a critic's favourite was found in the bin

Welcome back to Like a Chef, lifting the lid on restaurant cooking for you at home.

This week we’ll be diving head first into one of Fallow’s most famous dishes: the smoked cod head. We’ll go through all the details you might be curious about — from how we ended up with a huge fish head as one of our signature dishes to unveiling the secret to a perfectly crisp skin.

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Thanks for reading,

Jack & Will

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The Fallow cod’s head is a huge hit amongst our guests. It’s simultaneously delicate and bold, and its size makes it the perfect candidate for a sharing menu. But the beauty of the dish, to me, is more than the experience of eating it. The cod’s head highlights the essence of Fallow: a creative approach to cooking that finds inspiration in unlikely places.

Fallow’s smoked cod’s head, served with sriracha sauce and green oil.

Originally, we were using cod’s collar over at Heddon street, our first location. The collar is that meaty bit of fish behind the gills and before the main body. So overlooked, fish would traditionally be hung over the side of the boat through the collar to keep them fresh. As a result, the collar would be pierced and no good to sell.

Considering the amount of meat the collar packs, it occurred to Jack and I that this was nothing short of a massive waste, and we decided to find a way to put right the injustice. We had a go at serving it grilled, with a smoked bacon gel, monk’s beard, and pickled cedro lemon. Ridiculously delicious, it made it on our menu for our residency at Crispin.

The cod’s collar dish from our residency at Crispin

It went down so well with our guests that when we moved to Heddon street, we became determined to play around with different parts of fish that were getting thrown in the bin, on the hunch that there was more gold to be found. On a grey Tuesday morning our fish supplier received a somewhat confusing call from us asking whether he could send us the entire contents of his bin at the end of the day. Sure enough, we picked up a very fishy bag containing loads of salmon bellies, pollock heads, monkfish heads and whole cod’s heads. We initially tried using pollock heads, which were absolutely delicious, although in a way unsatisfying — as they didn’t have a whole lot of meat on them. Turbot worked better, but cost was a concern, and we wanted to use a fish that was more widely available.

The first version of the fish head, using turbot instead of cod

This was the point that Jack and I turned towards cod heads.

The heads came in whole back then. Jack and I would have to use a wood-saw down the side of the cod’s skull, just imagining what the guys back at Dinner by Heston would have made of us. Then, we’d brine them and dry them off. Their size made them pretty clunky to cook, so we used to remove the ring in the middle of the old school blue seal solid top and shallow fry them, which made them beautifully crispy. We’d then slowly bring them up to around 60°C in the oven, and let them rest for a long time, letting the heat penetrate past all that collagen and into the different areas and muscles within the head.

The next hurdle would be figuring out what to serve with such a standout piece.

We’d previously played around with an nduja butter sauce, which we originally paired with mussels. On the rare occasion that we both got a day off from Dinner at the same time, you would have found us in my back garden in Brixton shovelling mouthfuls of this stuff down our throats for ‘testing’ purposes. The richness, the heat, the intense brightness of the sauce seemed like a perfect pairing for the fatty cod’s head.

Mussels with nduja butter emulsion, the precursor to our sriracha sauce

When we tried it out in practice, however, we were disappointed. It was just too tricky to handle during service: nduja contains excess fat which would split the sauce. We wanted to keep nduja’s kick, but needed an ingredient that was water-based instead. That was when we had the idea to reduce our fermented sriracha and add it to a butter emulsion with pickled lemon juice.

This became the sriracha sauce that made the dish so iconic.

After the second lockdown when we reopened Fallow we put the cod’s head with sriracha sauce on the menu. It was just three of us in the kitchen: myself, Jack and Moussa, our kitchen porter. You can imagine how I felt when I looked up from the chef’s counter and saw the one and only Faye Maschler gliding through our door. She ordered the cod’s head, which at that point had only ever been tasted by Oísin Rodgers from the Devonshire around the corner, and tucked in.

Following what felt like an eternity of dreaded waiting, Maschler published her glowing review of the restaurant, praising the “glorious” grilled cod’s head. I often credit that review as the reason I decided it was time to have kids — it gave me confidence that the restaurant was going to be OK. (Funny story - I actually bumped into Fay recently and told her that very fact. She was justifiably bemused.)

The aftermath of getting a review in the Evening Standard is chaos. Food lovers flocked from far and wide, queuing out the door, each one desperate to sample the infamous cod head. However wonderful this explosion of attention was, it became a massive issue for us; we’d often find ourselves selling out, to the disappointment of Fallow-goers and to the distress of our chefs. The supply of heads was nowhere near enough to keep up with the demand.

The head shortage seemed bizarre considering the amount of wasted cod’s heads we knew were out there. After some forensic-level digging, we found many ships that led the Scottish cod industry in the Shetland islands were actually chopping off the heads on the ships and throwing them back into the sea then and there (like flushing gold down the toilet). This was a lightbulb moment — but an administrative nightmare. We had to nag our fish suppliers to nag the Scottish ships until they were finally convinced to change their processes and send us the heads instead.

Since this change, we’ve never had another issue with a lack of cod’s heads. If anything, the reverse is now the challenge: we never know how many are going to turn up in a delivery, and it can be pretty daunting to the chef who is responsible for prepping them.

For a restaurant that welcomes people from all over the world, the cod head is such a winner. Fish heads are actually very popular in many Asian and African cultures, and whilst the heads haven’t traditionally been so common in Europe, if you close your eyes and forget that there’s a head in front of you, most people just love the taste of cod. It’s a play on the familiar with a generous helping of theatre.

And the joy of digging into a cod’s head doesn’t have to be reserved for restaurants: it’s one of the most surprisingly accessible dishes to be prepared at home in very little time, at very little cost, and with very few ingredients. And the result? Mouthfuls of impossibly soft and yielding flesh wrapped up in smoky, crisp skin, with the final kicker of sweet and hot butter sauce. Fire up the BBQ.