Removing the Skin from a Fillet of Salmon

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I'm going to show you how to take the skin off of a salmon fillet and this would work for just about any fish species the technique that I'm going to show you. A lot of people tend to have problems with this and the main problem being is that there knife is not sharp enough. So first and foremost you need to have a very sharp knife, a razor sharp in that since so you get officiant cleaned cut to remove the skin from the flesh. This knife that I'm using is a scimitar and you notice that it has a sweep blade and because of that sweep it is a little bit easier to maneuver around bones and things and I use these knife a lot to clean fish or smaller models of course. But this larger model would do larger fish it is really nice to take the skin off of a fillet simply because it runs the whole width all most twice the width of the fillet it self and I will tell you why that is advantages here in a minute. So we got a piece of farmer salmon here with the skin still on it. Some folks want to remove the skin when they cook fish like this because it alter the flavor however the majority of the omega 3s that you want in fish are found in between the skin and the flesh so it is up to your weather you want to remove it or not. So I'm going to lay this fillet skin side down first and the first cut that I'm going to make I'm going to keep my knife completely parallel to the cutting surface here and I'm going to just start small spot a small corner of this fish as you could see there. This is going to be my guide as you could see there is not a whole lot of waist there and that is a good starting point for use. Now the trick for this is that we are going to leave the skin under these two fingers and we are just going to shave just gently across with the knife. Again my knife is completely parallel to the cutting surface as you could see so we got a really nice start here. So we are kind of using the skin as a guide theres is just a slight angle on my knife and I'm just kind of pushing back and forth. I will finish this way okay, I pulled a little bit back on the skin as I did that. I could show you since I have already cut through again. You pull just a little bit against the skin and there is just a slight angle on the knife, cut back and forth that direction and there is the skin in the fish, he is gone. You got a nice clean smooth surface there and that is a easy way to take the skin off of a fish."