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Filleting Your Fish
Filleting Your Fish
By Peter Kaminsky
It takes a certain amount of touch to fillet a fish, but expending a little more effort at the
cleaning stage is worth it because it means no bones at the eating stage. When you get
the hang of filleting, you can zip through a pile of fish pretty quickly, and it gives you a
sense of accomplishment that you can do something as well as the old-timers.
Don't worry too much if you don't get absolutely all the meat off the fish when you first
start filleting. The idea at the beginning is to get some. If you skin the fish, as
recommended, you do not have to scale it first. Obviously, if you are going to use the
skin, scale it unless you like to eat scales. Figure 1 shows the basics of filleting a small
fish (up to about 5 pounds).