Hello, Randy Brown here with Xtreme Hog hunter magazine.
You know as y'all seen yesterday we was out, me and Ian went out done a little bit of bass
fishing and we got a nice mess of large mount bass.
And Ian asked me to get with, come on here and just, just show you how to fillet a fish
and how to get prepped for cooking and eating your harvest.
Here we have some, there not especially large, large bass but they are large mount bass that
came out of our lake here in Enon.
But it's very important to manage your pond.
So a lot of people say man there little fish throw them back well the pond can get overpopulated
so you really have to manage your lake just like a deer hunter manages his property.
So we like to take fifteen inches and under out so the large ones have more room to grow.
So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna go through step by step show you how to fillet these
fish and then we'll get them good and seasoned up and tomorrow maybe we'll show you how to
cook them and how to enjoy your meal.
What you wanna do is just come in right behind the grill plate there.
Don't press down real hard.
Let the knife do the work for ya.
And you see its an electric knife so its gonna go pretty easy so once you hit your bone its
gonna want to stop so once you hit the backbone of the fish you just wanna keep your knife
running.
At the same time and roll the blade up keeping just a constant pressure on it just kind of
work it side by side.
Keep it pressed up against the ribcage and the backbone and your gonna cut right through
that.
Right through them ribs and if it won't go just don't force it just work your blade.
Let the blade do the work.
And when you get down in this area here you don't want to just cut all the way through.
You want to leave the skin on there.
So when you get right here, you can see I stop.
You just roll this over and let it fall and then grab your fish by its head and just go
down to that skin and let it work, just let it work slow.
Pull slightly.
Let the knife do the work.
Don't force it real hard.
And as you can see there's no meat on the skin.
And there's nothing but fillet here.
So once you got that to get it completely boneless, this is your rib cage here so all
this will be boneless.
So what you'll do then is just come down below your bones where you must stop.
Cut in there.
Turn your knife at a little angle and just follow the rib cage through like this.
And just simply work that off like that.
Some people leave it some people don't.
I like to take it off because you have a completely boneless free, bone free piece of fish there.
This you can just discard it.
And what you do then is just flip him over.
Start over coming right behind the grill plate, work it in so it hits the ribs.
Come down through let it hit the backbone and just let it just ride right down that
backbone.
Working that blade.
Working that blade side by side, up and down.
Just let it ease its way through.
Don't force it just let the knife do the work.
Get to the end of the tail, leave it attached.
Roll it over.
Same principal grab the head let it touch the skin and roll.
Lay that blade down flat against the skin and let it do its job.
Then you just wanna come I behind the ribs slightly just slice that ribcage off.
There's not much meat there.
You can eat it if you like mostly bones.
And there you have it.
All our nice catches cleaned.
Lot of nice boneless fillets here.
Wonderful, wonderful eating large mount bass.
All right as you've been with us right from the start we caught some nice bass here at
Enon.
I went over with you showed you how to fillet them out so now our next step is the most
important, feed the belly.
So what we've done is just got some regular fish batter here.
Got our fish fillets here.
All washed we've had them sitting in water all day.
So we got them out washed them up a little bit.
Bought us some nice fish batter there from the store.
Just your preference whatever kind you like.
Got our grease good and hot just over here.
So what your gonna do is just drop that fillet down in the batter.
Roll it over a little bit there couple of times.
Get you a good coating of seasoning on there.
Batter, drop it in the grease.
Now it don't take long.
You don't want to cook these things very long.
Rule of thumb is when the fillet is floating the fish is done.
What we're doing we got half of them there just regular, just in regular batter oil.
Some of us like a little spice.
So what we gonna do is got some Cajun seasoning there, we gonna drop some of that Cajun seasoning
down in there mix that up.
Have kind of two different flavours you know.
For the ones who like the spicy and the ones who don't.
And there you go fresh fried Enon fillet bass.
And that is your redneck tip of the day.
Is this the fish then?
That's it.
Lets see.
Taste it.
This feels heavy this must be one I caught.
Nah.
Not happening.
This is awesome.
How do you like that brother?
That's nice.
Not too bad for an old country boy is it.
I think it's a skill that was pulled out of the water.
Yeah that could be something to do with it.
This is an expertly caught fish.
We'll go with that.