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  • 1 day ago
Now that you’ve caught a fish, how do you clean it? In this video, a professional food stylist shows you the best way to break down, clean, and filet an entire fish. From removing the guts, scales, and fins to getting as much meat as possible off of the bones, your seafood dinner nights are about to get a lot more fresh.
Transcript
00:00You caught a fish, now what? The first thing you want to do is take the guts out. That is
00:04the first
00:04place that bacteria and any rot is going to happen into your fish. Find the belly of your fish. You
00:09take your knife and start just underneath the gill. Poke it in. You'll feel it break the membrane and
00:14you're just going to pull it back about halfway down the fish. You don't want to go too deep
00:17because you're trying not to tear up all those organs and have the goo fall out inside of the
00:21fish. Next, your fish normally come with scales. Find a knife that maybe you are not super, super
00:27attached to. You're just running it against the grain of the fish. This can be kind of a messy job
00:33that you can either do outside or again try to do it in your sink. This is totally up to
00:37you, but most
00:38fish that you're going to be eating, especially things coming from the Gulf, are going to have a
00:41dorsal fin like this. To make cutting this easier, we're just going to give them a little haircut. As
00:46well, you can either leave these fins on or take them off. They don't do anything for flavor, so I'm
00:51going to take this one off. Next, we're going to find the very back of the collar of the fish
00:55behind
00:55this fin right here. So starting at the top, I'm going to make one complete slice all the way down.
01:02You're not going through the bone. You're just letting it stop at that point. That's telling you
01:07that's as far as the meat goes on this filet. Next, I'm going to turn it to face away from
01:11me. I'm going
01:11to make an incision just along the backbone. I'm just going to drag a little bit at a time and
01:16take it
01:16to the very, very end. At this point right here, I'm just going to get back to the start and
01:22we're just
01:22going to go a little bit deeper. We've gotten to the end of this. I'll shove my knife like this
01:26right along the belly and then cut here. All of this right here can be removed. At this point right
01:32now, you can feel if there's any bones left in here. We've got pin bones that run down this ridge
01:37right here. You can remove these now or you can wait until you cook them to pull them out. When
01:42you
01:43can learn how to do this yourself, you're guaranteeing that you're getting all of the fish, like all the
01:48meat off of these bones. Anything that's left over, you're going to be able to use for lots of
01:52different other uses. Remember, always make fish stock with what you have left over.
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