Cut Fish Fillets

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Bruce Marnie again for Expert Village and in this clip we're going to show you how to take care of prepared fillets. In one case you may want to freeze it for storage if that's the case you want a package this in an air tight container like a ziplock bag or saran wrap. Wrap it tightly and put it in the freezer whole as is, on the other hand you want to cook it right now we need to remove the skin from the fillet, and we also need to cut it into usable sections. It's important to remove the skin before cooking because if you were to fry this entire fillet with the skin on it, it will curl. The skin will cause the fillet to curl up and be a problem so we'll prefer to remove the skin and fry just the remaining meat portion. Because the skin not only causes the fillet to curl but it also imparts desirable flavors, I now laid out one of the prepared fillets and we're going to cut it in preparation for cooking. We're assuming we're going to pan fry it, that's the easiest way for preparing it, there's other ways as well. In any event we set out a plate with a piece of paper towel on it to absorb any access moisture. What we want to do here is cut the fillet into thin sections so it'll cook quickly and also in the process remove the skin. So what we're going to do is take our knife with a pointed tip and it's important here it's not so important here to have a sharp knife because we don't want to cut all the way through the skin. We just want to cut down through the meat and when we reach the skin we're going to turn the knife horizontally and draw along the skin to remove the fillet from the skin. So we're going to do that for the first piece, move back about an inch or so further back and do the same thing again, and at an angle we're going to cut down from the skin turn the knife, cut horizontally to the cutting board, remove the fillet from the skin. So we're going to end up with a piece of skin on the cutting board and all of our nice skinless fillets on the paper towel ready for cooking. Coming back here again cutting down on an angle the reason why we cut it in an angle is so that we get our fillets wider we get a nice wide piece like a fish fillet as oppose to a little strip of bacon if we're to cut straight down the fillets will be very narrow. So coming back here giving an inch or two maybe cutting down at a 45 degree angle till you hit the skin turn the knife horizontally and cut against the skin. It helps if you hold the fillet from keeping it sliding on the cutting board and you have the fillet coming off like so. We'll continue this again once we remove the belly bones it's really easy to cut through this part of the fillet and makes nice sections here for fish steaks. Moving this along we'll continue with the rest of the fillet making nice sections for frying, the last one you have to cut the other way. The last one we're going to hold the skin put the knife the other way and just cut backwards to remove the skin from the fillet, now we've completed that fillet with a piece of skin that we throw away. Now we have great snapper all fillet we're ready to cook it up it's easily cooked by either sauteing with a slight flower coating and sauteing in butter or lemon or caper sauce, any way you cook it, it's going to be good, enjoy."