This video is to demonstrate how to filet round fish.
Salmon is a typical round fish.
What I'd like to go over first is the signs of a fresh fish.
So since fish are not inspected, you need to be able to inspect them yourself when you
get them in.
So the first thing you want-- very first thing is the odor.
There should be little to no odor.
What odor there is should be nice and kind of smells like fresh, clean ocean.
It shouldn't have a strong, fishy smell.
That means that it's getting old.
The next thing you want to look at is your gills.
And the gills should be nice and pink or red.
These are the lungs of the fish.
And just like our lungs, they should be nice and pink, and not brown and old looking.
The eyes of the fish should be bulging when you feel them.
They should come up out of the head.
And they should be nice and clear, not cloudy.
The belly, where the guts have been removed, should have no belly burn.
It should have a beautiful, lovely salmon, no browning inside.
The actual flesh-- the skin should feel smooth and just moist, just slightly slimy, but not
a strong sliminess.
And then the flesh itself, when you press on it, should be elastic and bounce back.
So you don't want to press real hard, because remember there's very little connective tissue
in fish.
But they should have some give to them, and not just fall apart or let your finger go
into them.
So the first thing when you're filleting round fish, is you're going to go down the center
of the fish.
You go under the gills, until you hit the bone.
And then you turn your knife.
Always a good idea to have flexible knives when you filet fish.
And you're going to cut through the pin bones.
I'm cutting through too much of the spine, sorry.
There we go.
And you take the first side off.
And then you turn the salmon over.
And do the same thing on the other side.
And from here, we're going to clean off these, kind of rib bones.
There's a couple more right here.
A bit over here, remove this.
Then we have those pin bones that we've cut through.
And you want to take your needle nose pliers or tweezers, and you just pull those out.
Run your finger along, make sure you don't miss any.
And then for our preparations that we're doing in class, we're going to take the skin off.
Salmon skin is really nice when you have the scales removed, to crisp up, frying or sauteing,
sauteing or pan searing.
But for most of preparations we're doing this week, we don't want the skin.
So you kind of make-- cut into the tail end just a little bit.
And then using towel, or paper towel, hold it- you kind of pull the skin and glide, wiggle
your knife, wiggle the skin back and forth along your knife.
Along the edge of the cutting board, remove the skin.
And then from here, we're ready to cut it into our individual portions.
You cut them at an angle.
It makes it look nicer on the plate, than cutting it straight up and down.
Like so.
And that's how to filet a round fish.