From cheeks to corals: how to cook (and eat) fish and seafood heads  

Once, at Elkano, Aitor Arregui’s temple of fish and seafood in Getaria, in the Basque Country, he asked me if I enjoyed eating heads. “Absolutely,” I said adamantly. “Let’s prepare something special for you,” Arregui said.    

What came next was a carte blanche menu in which all dishes were comprised solely of fish and crustacean heads and their respective parts, from hake kokotxas (flavourful, gelatine-rich cheeks) to the tomalley, the gooey, greenish-brown paste in a lobster's head — part of the animal's digestive system and one of its most flavourful.   

Head on a plate

One person’s trash is another’s treat. Although not widely appreciated, foodies worldwide know that the head is one of the tastiest parts of fish and crustaceans: eyes, collars, tongue, throat, cheeks and coral are used in a whole range of delicious recipes — or even whole, as Arregui does regularly for his guests. “It’s the part of the animal’s body that concentrates many flavours and textures,” he says.   

^{Head dishes at Elkano. Photos author's own}

Serving heads is also a move to reduce food waste by encouraging people to consume or otherwise use more parts of animals. Far from being scraps, fish heads are prized in many cultures worldwide, from Polynesia to the Mediterranean. In Portugal and Spain, people save prawn heads to the very end to enjoy the juices as flavour shots after devouring the sweet flesh.   

At his recently opened Canalha in Lisbon, Portuguese chef João Rodrigues has created a dish that reveres the head and tail of the carabineiro equally. The red scarlet prawn is separated, and half fried (tail) and grilled (head) so that, after eating the tender fried tail, the guest can "suck on the [juices from the] grilled head and take out all that intense, subtly smoked flavour," as the chef explains. "The heads are parts that are undervalued in the kitchen, but that's where the most intense flavours come from," he adds.   

Long before heads in dishes (from birds to mammal skulls) started featuring on tasting menus around the world, the heads of sea creatures were found in dishes in fine-dining restaurants — from Peruvian pirañas at Central, to a lion head croaker at Vicky Cheng’s Wing, in Hong Kong. “But it's something we've started to value more recently in haute cuisine," says Spanish chef Quique Dacosta, one of the pioneers of serving head-on prawns at his eponymous three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Denia.    

On this year’s menu, Dacosta serves a local gamba roja alone on a plate covered by a linen napkin (pictured top). When you open the delicate fabric, the entire animal is there, to be devoured, starting with the tail and then the head. "It's a dish for people to understand intensity and sweetness, the bravery and domestication of the flavour. The tail is tamed, subtle, soft, and almost sweet. But the head is brave, with iodine, and very tasty. The flavours are so different that we propose two different pairings: for the tail, we serve Champagne; for the head, a glass of amontillado sherry," he explains. 

_{Photo by Pelut i Pelat}

For some years, the chef has been trying to highlight the concentrated flavour of fish and crustacean heads. After many experiments – using everything from the coral (unfertilised roe of the female lobster) in the head to the cartilage to even the ‘lips’ of a red mullet – Dacosta has created a bread (above) made from hake heads for the 2024 season. "We used all the collagen and gelatinousness present in the fish head to make a pil pil base for the loaf, taking advantage of the emulsion to create a proper baguette," he explains. "Our objective is to change how people perceive these fish in their totality," he says.   

How to cook fish and crustacean heads

Home cooks can make the most of heads too; fish heads are cheap or even free if you have a good relationship with your local fishmonger. Crustaceans are often sold heads-on, so it's essential to know how to cook (and taste) this part so you don't have to throw it in the trash.   

Fish heads can be roasted whole and present many opportunities for spicing and seasoning. “Leaving the head and collars on smaller fish and then proceeding to either butterfly or split them in half are some of the nicest ways to serve a fish,” says chef Josh Niland in his book Fish Butchery. “It offers the diner a multitude of tastes, textures and also delivers a sense of reverence towards the fish that’s being eaten,” he adds. But he warns that the flesh on the head and collars should be vibrant, glassy and firm to the touch: if not, you should discard it.    

The cheeks, butchered out, offer good results, from poaching them to make a flavourful, thick stock to simply roasting them in the oven, says Niland. Grilling fish heads over charcoal is also a good idea since their richness in collagen means fish heads smoke with ease, and they're hard to overcook. “Head can tolerate intensities of heat without drying out as badly as the fillet, due in part to the amount of connective tissues, collagen and fats they present,” he adds. It’s almost an error-proof ingredient. 

Grilling crustaceans is also a good way to taste the heads with subtle smoky notes, especially if we’re talking about head-on prawns: they have a slightly thicker shell than shrimp, offering a ‘shield’ to protect the juices from overcooking. The difficulty is finding different cooking points for the tail and head – or at least cooking them more uniformly. Usually, as the meat of these animals is delicate, it requires less time on the heat, which means that head corals and tomalley are often served raw.   

Lobster is even trickier because the tail is smaller, the carcass is thinner at the bottom, and the head is protected. Therefore, the heat takes longer to penetrate. “That is why the lobster must be cut into pieces and cooked," says Dacosta.   

According to him, finding more empirical methods in the kitchen is essential, as animals vary significantly in size, which changes the entire cooking process. "Many books say that lobsters need 12 minutes to cook to perfection, but what size are we talking about?" he asks. The chef says that, for the gamba roja, he found the perfect temperature [62°C/144°F] that allows the meat to be tender, while at the same time the corals in the head to thicken and create a flan texture. "When the coral or tomalley are raw and more liquid, they can taste bitter and unpleasant,” he explains.    

How to eat fish and crustacean heads

In the case of prawns and shrimps, it's simple: suck the head – without an ounce of shame. There’s no better way to taste all the juices and ‘stuff’ that resides there. Restaurants also use the corals as a sauce for the tail in the case of prawns, so the flavours can be combined. Rodrigues created a dish in which he cooked the tail in carabineiro oil and then crushed the grilled heads in a press, serving all the resulting juice alongside. “The dish had a balance between sweetness and spectacular smoke,” he says.    

In the case of fish, it's either worth using a fork to remove as much meat as possible from the fish's face — between the eyes and jaws — or, as Arregui recommends, grabbing the head with your hands. “It’s like chicken wings: it tastes better if you eat it with your hands,” he jokes. Niland recommends spreading fish throats on toast and with just a touch of salsa verde and salt – "heaven," he says.