How to Fillet a Whole Fish Like a Pro - Kitchen Conundrums with Thomas Joseph

slang a whole fish can save you a lot of money and it's not too hard to do all you need to know is the techniques whenever you're buying whole fish at the supermarket or if you have a local fishmonger that you like you want to look for a few things one of course is smell the fish should not smell at all it should smell almost like sea water the second thing you want to look for is that the eyes aren't all bloodshot you want them to be clear and not cloudy at all and the third thing is the gills the gills should be just as they are here pink but not bloody this is how you know that your fish is fresh as you can see here this fish has been gutted which means that the innards have been removed it has also been trimmed slightly so there was a little pectoral fin here that has been removed and also the back fin has been removed as well now if you wanted to cook a whole fish like this the one thing that you would need to make sure you do first get all of the scales off you could take the blade of a knife and actually go against the fish scraping up any of those scales but I'm going to remove the skin today so I'm going to show you how to do that so to start filleting a fish you need a sharp sharp knife I'm using a boning knife here because a boning knife is a thin knife that's flexible take your knife and you're gonna go right behind that pectoral fin I have my knife slightly angled you're gonna slice into the fish behind the head and you're gonna feel resistance you're going to feel bones in the fish that's when you want to stop slicing so now what you're going to do is you're going to start the knife right at the tip of the backbone here right behind the head gently glide the knife cutting through the skin along this top backbone here once you get a few inches down you can actually pick up the fillet of the fish and rotate it up so that you can see what you're doing and instead of cutting like this you're going to glide the knife along the backbone and you want to make sure that you stay along the backbone because you don't want to take away too much of the flesh of the fish so stay close to that backbone gliding the knife pulling back the fillet as you do it as you can see I'm coming past the backbone here and now this is kind of the stomach of the fish here keep on gliding the knife now a sharp knife is key here because if you have a dull knife it's not going to cut through the fish it's going to just flake the fish apart so now you have a beautiful fillet if you liked the crispy skin of the fish you can keep it on but I'm going to remove it a little bit later I'm going to repeat the process with the other side so you're going to flip the fish cut right behind the head and that pectoral fin and glide your knife along the backbone now whether your fish is a smaller fish or a big fish it's all the same for any round fish this is a snapper and this is considered a round fish there is another type of fish called a flatfish which would be soul or flounder and there is a totally different way of filleting that fish so you have to stay tuned for that episode you can save this for a wonderful fish stock if you'd like take the fillet put it skin side down you're going to take your sharp knife and right before the tip of the fillet here you're going to cut into the meat angle your knife slightly and you're going to hold on to this little tail that you've created this might be a little slippery so if you want you can use a piece of paper towel to give you a better grip on the skin of the fillet push down and you're going to shimmy the skin from left to right and pull the skin back towards me and push the knife away from me and what this does is it glides the knife along the back of the skin and it separates the fillet from the skin and it should come off in one nice piece here you should have no skin on the underside of your fillet and now you're ready to cook this up however you'd like so there you go you're ready to cook your fish up how easy was that I really encourage you guys to go out buy a whole fish take it home and fillet it give yourself some practice and I know you will become a pro you

Channel: Everyday Food

Views: 124,092

Keywords: Recipe, Recipes, Cooking, Cook, Food, Dinner, Easy meal, Dinner tonight, Everyday Food, Home made, Martha Stewart, Family meal, easy cooking, how to, food ideas, quick dinners, fast recipes, easy recipes, quick recipes, filleting, fish

Id: zFbBehtHRQQ

Length: 4min 51sec (291 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2016