Fish
White fish
Lean, delicate and quick — the food most likely to be overcooked by somebody being careful.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
White fish is around eighty per cent water held in short muscle fibres with very little connective tissue, so it needs almost no time and has no margin at all. The moment the fibres contract, the water is expelled and the fillet goes from translucent to chalky. It also has no fat to buffer the surface, so hot dry air dries the outside before the inside is warm — which is why nearly every published time for it is under fifteen minutes and why the flake test matters more than the clock.
Why the cut matters
Cod, haddock and their relatives are treated as one food here because the cooking problem is identical across them and we have not found a manufacturer chart that distinguishes between them either. A thick loin and a thin tail piece are a much bigger difference than cod against haddock, which is why the form page works in thickness.
Cooking pages
- White fish fillet — Fresh fillets get twenty to thirty-two minutes in the two manufacturers' tables that name a state; shorter figures elsewhere name none.
- Whole fish — One manufacturer prints fifteen to twenty-five minutes at 180–200°C for a 300-400g fish, and the size that fits is the real constraint.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.