The tourist season is about to start as July is on us... crowded shops and traffic jams.

It took me a while to understand why Friday evenings in tourist season could often be quiet... it’s changeover day on Fridays at most holiday cottages.

At this time of year, like many local restaurants, mine is often full of tourists on Saturday evenings but our locals can, and do, easily get tables on Fridays.

Dorset Seafood Festival is one of the foodie highlights of the year and is being held on the weekend of July 11 and 12.

It is a wonderful celebration of the best of Dorset and is on the harbour at Weymouth, free to enter, so if you go to no other food festival this year try to get to Weymouth over the weekend.

I’m doing a cook-along and a demo on Saturday afternoon and I’ll be eating my way through as many stalls as I can when I’m not working!

My recipe this month is a light summery dish from my book FISH.

Pho is a Vietnamese version of a traditional French consommé-based soup.

Brill is the perfect fish for this dish because it’s a wonderfully mild flavoured, yet firm fish, so it will hold together and enable the consommé to stay clear.

Brill Pho

Prepare 20 minutes, cook 10 minutes (excluding stock)

  • 1kg brill or 2 x 500g brill
  • 2 carrots
  • 2 sticks celery
  • 1 brown onion
  • Fish sauce (Nam Pla)
  • 6 salad onions
  • 2 shallots
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • 2 limes 
  • Small bunch fresh coriander
  • 20ml sesame oil

Fillet and skin the brill. Use the bones, skin, carrots, brown onion and celery to make one litre of clear fish consommé. Add all ingredients to a large pan, heat to about 80C and hold at that temperature for two hours – it is very important not to simmer or boil the consommé.

Carefully ladle off about one litre of the liquid for stock without disturbing any sediment in the bottom of the pan.

Finely slice the stalk of the coriander, set the leaves to one side to garnish the dish.

Finely slice the garlic and shallots and on a low heat, fry in a large saucepan with the sesame oil.

Add the fillet of brill to the saucepan and fry with just enough heat to cook but not to caramelise.

Now add 2tsp of chopped coriander stalks.

Pour the stock into the saucepan and bring to a gentle simmer.

To taste, add a little fish sauce to season (approx 1tsp) then trim and finely slice the salad onions on the slant and add to the Pho.

Squeeze the juice of one lime into the Pho and cut the other lime into four wedges to garnish the dish.

Divide between four bowls and garnish with coriander leaves and a wedge of lime.