Cleaning & Preparation to Fillet a Round Fish

Series Summary

Looking for quick and easy recipes for preparing fish? Eating fish a few times a week could significantly improve your diet and health. Many studies show regular consumption of fish can improve several health issues, including asthma, cardiovascular disease, depression, and improve brain and eye functions. Fish is low in fat, high in protein and an excellent source of omega 3 fatty acids.

In this series of free video clips expert Louis Ortiz shows you the basics of cooking fish. He offers three easy fish recipes, demonstrating how to prepare and cook Seared Salmon fillets, how to fry farm-raised catfish, and how to make fish stock. You’ll learn step by step how to identify the freshness of the fish, clean and fillet round fish and flat fish, the correct way to remove the skin from a fillet, how to make breading to fry fish in, and how to make a basic fish stock, as well as fumet style, which is a stock that calls for white wine. These fish stocks can be added to sauces to enhance their flavor.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I'm going to show you how to clean a fish. We have chosen a beautiful gulf red snapper and this is a example of a round fish and a round fish meaning that as you look at the fish there is a eye on each side of the head and there is a different filleting technique for flat fish and round fish and we will show you a flat fish in another video. One of the things that you want to look for in the fish market when you are chosen fish is nice clear eyes as this one has. As you could tell the iris and everything is very desirable it is not really cloudy, the eye are not to sunken it, the fish itself is still a little bit slimy. Another thing you want to look for too is red gills which this one has and if the gills are brown or tan it is usually a aged fish and that is not a good sign. But as you could see we got some red nice gills and the gills it selves are really nice and slimy. So that is what we are looking for with regards with fresh fish. The tail isn't to beat up, the fins them self looks pretty nice. So I had this fished scaled at the fish market which is going to facilitate the filleting and I got some culinary shears here and these dorsal fins are quiet finny and there is a mild toxin on the end of those. You don't want to contend with so I'm just going to trim this guys off along the base and get those off of there because I don't fill like getting stuck while I'm filleting this fish or maneuvering around on the cutting board. Depending on what side you want to start with it is up to you. We are going to work around the head and the gill plate and the pectoral fin here so I'm going to make a cut that goes this way and it is just kind of a semi circle in that since because of the meat itself is only going as far as here. So you go ahead and make a incision this way and then cut around the actual fin this way. Now another cut that I like to do I like to make before I start to go down the dorsal fin this way is just make a cut with the tip of the knife and filleting is more then just a fill as you fill the knife slide against bones and you are just kind of shaving the meat aways from the bones. So it is not so much cutting as it is shaving. Alright so we go a starting cut here and I'm just going to keep my knife parallel to the cutting surface here and just follow that dorsal fin. It helps to have a mental picture what the face looks like from the inside before you start cutting into it and as you know there is radio fins that goes on top of the fish and the bottom so essentially we are following those radio fins down to the center. So again I'm really just kind of shaving along his radio bones and we are going to work our way down to the base of the tail as well. Now I'm going to go ahead and insert the knife and come out through the base of the tail so I could bring the knife this way and finish that cut essentially and that would give us a guide for the rest of the filleting and you would see here in a minute. We would just follow the length of that tail up onto the very end because that is essentially where the meat stops. Alright so now that I have passed over the center bone here there is a hump of source so my knife essentially would follow the radio bones and shaved along there until I felt that bone and I stopped. So don't force the cut because you would start to dull the knife and come up with a rougher cut. We came back down to the base once again I poked the knife all the way through and finished out through the tail so that now I come from the underneath side and just follow those radio bones from the round bone this way. And again I'm not cutting at all, I'm not hacking or anything I'm just sliding the knife shave along those bones and shaved along these rib bones as well. Don't try to cut through those because we don't want them on the fillet anyway and now we are back to where we started I'm just going to release that and this is what you are trying to shoot for is the most amount of yield to get the most amount of meat off of this fish and we are going to show you in another video how you use these fish bones to your advantage for both the flat fish and the round fish so we make a delicious sea food stock. So essentially I'm going to do the exact same procedure on the other side of the fish so I will come out with two fillets and we would come right back and show you the flat fish."