Open Australian chef Josh Niland's new cookbook and you will see a literal representation of its title – a whole fish (a bass grouper), severed into its many edible, cookable parts. All 31 of them. There are, it turns out, far more parts of a fish that deserve a lick of heat and hit a of salt than you might think.

The Whole Fish Cookbook distils Niland's belief that we should treat fish cookery with the same confidence we do meat, in terms of the actual hob action as well as the butchery that comes first.

His aim is to arm us with some methods "beyond just pan frying", to diversify the kind of fish we're bringing home, and make us think about seafood a little differently.

Take a tuna cheek compared to a beef cheek. Sure, you'll cook them for different lengths of time, but, Niland notes, "you can braise a beef cheek in red wine, so why can't I do that with tuna? And why can't I serve it with mashed potatoes and a little onion and bacon and do a tuna cheek bourguignon?"

The chef, who heads up celebrated seafood restaurant Saint Peter in Sydney, Australia, may be a seafood aficionado now, but by no means did he grow up on the beach. He recalls that a local river did cut through his town though, and his mum would take him there every so often. "We would make a dough out of flour, water and Vegemite, then we'd put it on a hook and literally throw it in and see what we could catch," he remembers, with a laugh. "I was always amused that we could catch stuff with such primitive bait."

His mum would show him how to gut the fish ("You wouldn't pull any of the pin bones out, that was too much work") before dusting it with flour and cooking it in a pan, spraying it with canola oil.

"It was not a luxe fish set up that I grew up with, but it was an understanding that you catch it, then you cook it and eat it." That respect for the fish is built into the methods and techniques he advocates for now.

"To buy a sweaty piece of salmon coming out of a little packet, I think, is doing a further disservice to the fish," he explains. "You're not getting a great sense of what the flavour of the fish is, you're just getting the omega-3s you're craving."

Instead, he is interested in 'fish-to-gill' cooking, dry handling (not rinsing fish under water), dry ageing and curing (like you would meat), and not always reaching to place a fillet in a pan.

"In my head, there is 91 per cent [eating] potential in a round fish," Niland explains. "Gone are the days when it used to be 40-50 per cent yield." His recipes (which are genuinely usable ("I haven't gone too geeky with cheffy stuff") and his menu, reflects that commitment to cutting waste and using every scrap of the catch, and so creating everything from fish black pudding to glazed fish throats and fried scales.

RECIPE: Crumbed Sardine Sandwich

And while the squeamish may struggle initially, Niland already finds the first thing that sells out in his restaurant is fish offal. "It is the most desired commodity on the menu, which is wonderful," he says with pride, and a certain amount of awe. He describes watching people come into his Fish Butchery – Australia's first sustainable fishmonger - and order his king fish sperm mortadella, which features king fish liver pate in a baguette with strands of carrots and spring onions, like a banh mi.

"They walk out eating it, and I'm just giggling to myself like, 'Wow, that's amazing, that's such a leap,'" he buzzes. "That's extraordinary to me, and I think that's because it comes with, not humour, but a gesture and a level of value, where we've managed to modify something previously perceived as icky and weird and slightly phallic, and turn it into something really ultimately delicious."

It works, he says, because however different the ingredients, it's still familiar to the eye. Hence why he'll joint fish to look like lamb cutlets and T-bone steaks – it helps assuage people's fish related fears.

"There are customers who would never have ordered that fish with the bone in, but because on the menu I say, 'Yellow fin tuna ribeye', and it comes out and literally looks like the most beautiful beef ribeye you've ever seen, and it's got Cafe de Paris butter on it, a side of chips and a lovely green salad; there's comfort there immediately," he explains. "And when they eat it, it's like, 'Wow, I've never had fish like this before.'"

What he doesn't want to do is make people feel uncomfortable, "or belittled, as if, were you globally aware of food trends, you'd know better." And that goes for eating fish out, as well as preparing it at home.

One of the major problems is a lack of confidence, says Niland, especially when so many of us "get convinced by TV to take a whole fish home and give it a crack for the first time," even though "to go home with a whole fish is super intimidating for a novice cook." Going down that route means you'll almost certainly "end up with scales up the curtains".

The idea is, The Whole Fish will break things down, and build up your seafood confidence and technique as you work your way through it.

But even Niland accepts there is an oceanic joy to be found in a dinner that reminds you of your first, simple childhood encounters with seafood. "I really love crumbed fish," he says cheerfully. "It's a big trigger in your brain of being a kid eating fish fingers."

His favourite fish, if forced to choose, is the Australian King George whiting. "It's definitely a Rolls Royce fish that is a bit of a memory burner the first time you have it," he says, before succumbing to a dreamy seafood reverie. "Even a collar cut from a fish, with just the little bone attached – it looks like a beautiful big pork chop, but really it's a crumbed piece of fish." Trick the eyes, and you'll be diving headlong into seafood too.

l The Whole Fish Cookbook: New ways to cook, eat and drink by Josh Niland, published by Hardie Grant, priced £25. Photography Rob Palmer