Is your fish fresh?

How to tell how fresh fish is? With filleted fish it can be very difficult, one must rely on your sense of smell and touch.

• When lightly pressed the flesh of fresh fish should be quite resilient and bounce back, the older it gets the more likely it is that the indent will remain or slowly bounce back.
  
  
• It should of course smell fresh, the more it smells like fish the older it is. The fresher it is the less unpleasant aroma there will be.
  
  
• The above presumes you are allowed to smell and touch prior to purchase otherwise you must rely on the supplier and maybe the use by date if packaged.

For whole fish look for:

• A pleasant aroma (someone once wrote that, fish should smell of the sea, be briny in aroma . . . by the time it smells of fish it is too late).
  flesh that is resilient.
  
  
• Plentiful scales that are not dried up.
  
  
• The body being covered in sea slime.
  
  
• Bright, bulging eyes.
  
  
• The gills should be bright and / or red and free from any yeasty aroma and slime (slime in the gills is usually a bacterial slime - not good)