Filleting Bream (Blue Gills)

when you're getting ready to clean your fish it's important that you start with a really sharp knife this is a fillet knife I think it's a Rapala it's made for the Rapala company there's a lot of choices on the market make sure you get a good quality filet knife I like the ones that have the longer blade some of the blades are down to as short as four inches long or so I like a longer blade this is a steel that comes out of your butcher block a lot of times people don't even know what they're made for but they're made of a really hard metal that's harder than the metal that is on your blade and the blade actually has thousands of micro serrations down it and those micro serrations will bend over when you're cutting and so you hit it with the steel I hit it with the steel every four or five fish and it keeps that blade really really sharp and so I'll prepare my blade and if your serrations on that blade are bent over you can actually feel them if you push your thumb down the side you can feel them bent over and you want to get those all straightened out so your blade is really sharp and that's really sharp yep now we had a real good time catching bluegills and I'm going to show you how to clean these how to fillet them and then in a little bit I'm going to show you the old traditional method of scaling them and just preparing them to eat frying them whole with just the head often and having the guts taken out of them now filleting fish is not difficult at all I want to mention too that I always use one of these cheap plastic tables I picked this up at a discount store and I don't have to have a butcher block I can just use my table I'll scrub it down after I've washed it off I'm going to use vinegar to sanitize it wipe it down really good it'll be ready to clean fish on again now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the tip of my knife and I'm going to cut in right behind the gill plate and here's the gill plate right here and I'm going to start right behind the gill plate at the top of the fish and I'm going to right down straight and you can feel the bones the backbone and you can also feel the ribs with the tip of your knife now if you can imagine in a fish it's just like you would see in the cartoons when a cat pulls the fish out of a garbage can there's just a bunch of Bones running up and down well it's really the way it is on a bluegill and I'm going to follow those right down the backbone right down the dorsal fin here and I can feel that rib cage with the tip of my knife and I'm going to work my way around that rib cage you can see it right there the rib cage and then I'm going to turn that fish and work right down the rib cage until I get to the back of the fish and I'm going to cut right down the back but I'm going to leave a little bit of skin right here at the tail and that's going to give me room to flip that fillet over and now I'm going to be able to have that skin hold that fillet steady as I lay my knife right in next to the skin and I'm going to fillet that meat right off that skin and you have a small fillet but it's really really delicious meat and there's something about bluegill it is the best meat that you can eat it's the most delicious fish that you can eat and my wife and my daughter and I we typically fry up about seven or eight blue gills which is about sixteen filets and that's a great meal so it's not very difficult when I get on a roll I can fillet one fish a minute so you can imagine it doesn't take me very long to fillet an entire meal now what we do in our household is after I throw these fish guts and and the bones and everything into this garbage pail I've got a clean bag and I'm going to put it in another bag and what we do in our family is we put them in the freezer a lot of times people don't want to have fish around because they don't know what to do with the leftovers and it's going to be three or four days before the garbage man comes and so we put them in the freezer so there's no smell and on garbage day we take them out put them in the garbage and set them out and they're picked up so there's no no mess no hassle no smell and that resolves that problem that sometimes people have when they consider cleaning fish and having fish that are fresh at their house now I'm going to show you the traditional way that we did in the south you use a little this is a teaspoon and this fish the bluegill is covered with scales now in the old days when I was kid we always cooked them so that we could eat all the meat off the fish and that meant leaving the fish whole except for we're going to take the head off and take the entrails out and I'm going to show you how to do that you hold that fish down with your left hand if you're right-handed use your teaspoon and go right down the back of that fish and take all the scales off it's not difficult to do you want to take all the scales off flip that fish over go right down the back and down the side and take the scales right off now we're going to then eat the skin which is just fine it tastes delicious we're going to coat it with a cornmeal and salt pepper mixture we're going to deep-fry it it's going to taste delicious and it's going to make for an interesting look on the platter it may shock some people but it's really quite interesting and quite fun now I'm going to cut the head off I'm going to cut right behind the gill plate using my knife usually I'd use a butcher knife but since we've been filleting fish I'm gonna use my filet now cut the head off throw that in my garbage pail and then at the anal opening right down in front of this pectoral fin I think it's called pectoral fin I'm going to cut right down and cut it right to where the head was and then I'm just going to empty all the intros right into the right into my garbage pail okay so your fish is going to look more like you see it in the market the heads off the intros have been taken out and I'm going to rinse this a little bit since I've still got some scales on it so I'll use my water hose over here I keep a water hose nearby so I can clean up everything real quickly and it real easily and I'll throw that in ice and I'm going to do the last one a half and then after I finish this fish we're going to go and prepare one of the most delicious meals that you could prepare for your friends and family you

Channel: field2feast

Views: 108,107

Keywords: fishing, wild game, small game, Minnesota, trout, blue gills, hunt, fish, bream, filleting bream, filleting blue gills, filleting, filleting fish, cleaning fish, cleaning bream, how to fillet fish, Fillet, Game (Cuisine), scaling fish, how to clean fish

Id: an9ayPPLzm4

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2013