If you love cooking shows as much as I do, you've surely heard experts praise bone-in meat for boosting the flavour of a dish.
Osso buco, an Italian favourite, is wonderfully aromatic because it employs both bone and marrow, which slowly breaks down during the cooking process to release a rich stew. And how can you have a roast chicken without using a whole bird? The bones give it effortless flavour.
The same goes for fish. While it's easy to have a fishmonger expertly fillet a salmon, cod or red mullet for you, if you are a true seafood lover, you'll surely opt for the whole fish.
I've mentioned my troubled childhood of visiting fishmongers before: always leaving with 5 kilograms of fish heads, rather than beautifully trimmed fillets. I didn't like making these trips because dinner that night meant teasing out the meat from the bones, which made dinner labour intensive to say the least. It wasn't an easy task for a 9-year-old who was still learning how to use chopsticks correctly. The good news is, I wasn't the only Australian child with a fishy upbringing.
The secret to a perfect seafood meal lies in the raw material – the seafood itself must be of impeccable quality and you'll want to leave the bones in. Source: Ben Dearnley
, the chef and owner of Sydney's Hello Auntie restaurants, tells me he had dramatic experiences with fish during his childhood.
"I used to love ca chem kho, but only the sauce and not the fish. As a child, I remember one dinner eating the rich sauce of ca chem kho and having a large but thin bone lodged in my throat," he says.
"I freaked out and from this experience, I kinda developed a complex about fish dishes and I didn't eat fish until I was in my late 20s actually - steering clear of all seafood. It wasn't until I started my career [as a chef], which forced me to try fish again."
Nguyen not only shared his traumatic childhood experience with me, but imparted advice on how to make a great tasting ca chem kho. "Due to the cooking method, the most popular cut of fish is the cutlet. Fish on the bone will hold more moisture leading to juicer flesh and the window of error while cooking is greater," Nguyen explains.
Fish on the bone will hold more moisture leading to juicer flesh and the window of error while cooking is greater.
Marco Dazzan is another chef who remembers choking on a fish bone regularly. Even still, he continues to enjoy dishes like baccala alla Veneziana. "Choking on a bone is standard for me," Dazzan says. "But the worst time was when I was a kid. For Easter, my mum always cooked stockfish in a dish called baccala alla Veneziana, which is cooked with shallots, milk and sometimes saffron to make it fancy."
He remembers choking on a fish bone while eating baccala alla Veneziana. "I couldn't swallow and started to cry so my dad threw me a piece of bread to 'push' the bread down. I survived and continued eating the baccala more carefully," Dazzan says.
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I remember my mum similarly pushing over a bowl of rice and telling me to 'chase' the bone away by eating a big scoop of it. Surely only kids with tough parents survived situations like these.
However, there are definitely rewards to eating whole fish. During my first visit to Singapore, I was determined to try the local delicacies and specialties: bak kut teh, a pork soup, and, of course, fish-head curry. 
I remember sitting down in a carpark in between apartment blocks on plastic stools and waiting for a fish-head curry I'd ordered. My friends had staked the curry from this particular eatery as the absolute best in the city and, thinking back, it really was great, including because of the battle to get the fish meat out (mainly from the cheek of the fish). It was also great because the fish bones and head gave the curry an intense flavour and a rich, silky feel.
Use a whole fish head in your next curry for maximum flavour and visual impact. Source: Sharyn Cairns
Melbourne-based chef remembers eating fish-head curry with his grandfather in Singapore.
Govindasamy says, "Oh wow that brings back so many memories. I grew up in my grandad's house on Race Course Road [in Singapore], and on that street was the famous Muthu's [Curry restaurant] fish-head curry. No matter what time I walked past, the restaurant was packed."
He remembers Muthu's Curry used mainly snapper or other big, white fleshy fish heads. "But you really wanted the cheek of the fish – that was the sweetest," he says.
Govindasamy appreciated the labour involved in Muthu Curry's version. He explains that restaurants typically use fish heads since they are cheap and usually thrown out by fishmongers. "But it was an art to cleanly eat the flesh off the head. And the head imparted so much more flavour into the curry than just bones.
"As a kid, my whole family, sometimes a group of 15, would sit and enjoy this aromatic fish head curry."
Fish bones feature heavily in broths, sauces and stocks. If you can intensify the flavour of a dish without throwing away what holds it together, why not?
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