Fillet a Fish

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Bruce Marnie again for Expert Village. In this segment we're going to talk about actually filleting the fish. Now we're going to spin the fish on the cutting board around 180 degrees and work on the belly side. Now I'll spin the cutting board around with the fish on it and we're going to do the same thing to the ab section of the fish along it's ventral surface. So I'm going to start from the cut that we made from the purpose of cutting right at the anus and I'm going to follow a cut all the way along just on top of the anal fin down here. The same way all the back to the tail and it's important to stay on top of the ribs, you don't want to get underneath the ribs so stay on top of the ribs again with your thumb peeling back the flesh. Until you see the backbone right there now we have the backbone exposed and it's not unusual to have the fillet being separated from the backbone because of your cut from the other side as well. Now that we cut down along the backbone we're going to remove the entire fillet from the fish. We're going to rotate the cutting board 90 degrees so that the fish is 90 degrees to us, with my left hand I'm going to reach the fillet and lift it up as much as I can from the backbone. Take my knife and release it from the tail one simple cut, now you'll notice you see ribs here, ribs here, and the backbone and the fillet is ready to come off along the belly portion. So all I have to do is roll the fillet up take my knife and cut towards the head very carefully, and the fillet comes right off the fish. Now we've removed this half from the entire fish and this discoloration of the belly area is not uncommon and nothing to worry about. That's from the guts being in the fish and we're going to remove the belly in the next step anyways. So now you have a nice beautiful fillet here that's minimally damaged by contamination with blood or fresh water. Now we're going to take this first fillet and set it in our bowl for safe keeping while we'll remove the second fillet from the other side of the fish. Again I can't emphasize enough the importance about keeping fresh water away from the cuts surface of the salt water fishes flesh. It's okay to scale the fish under water because you aren't exposing cut flesh to the fresh water, but once you begun the filleting process you want to minimize contact with fresh water on the cuts surface of the fishes flesh. Now the way to tell a good fillet job is if you lift up the carcass you can see light through the ribs, that indicates that you've removed both fillets from the backbone leaving no waisted meat in the process."