How To Filet A Fish

I am going to show you how to "bone out" a sea bass. We are going to take both fillets off. I am going to do one side very quickly and I will do the other side a little slower.

When you see the second fillet, it will make more sense. So the first thing we are going to do, when I am using a proper knife which is quite flexible and if you have a flexible knife, it means you can just slide all the way down the fish's backbone. But I am going to cut into the flesh and I am going to show you how to do it incorrectly to begin with because if I carry on, what will happen is you will end up with a thin line of fish all the way to the end and actually, you want to incorporate both contours.

So if you do find that you are making a mistake, it is easy to correct. You just go back out with the knife to the two contours and then you can reset the position of your knife so that when you slide along like that, you are sliding along all the way to the head. So when you get to the head, as you can see that fillet is now taken off, when you get to the head, just at an angle, cut around the actual head itself.

Round it goes. You should find that you can just rip that fillet off. So, just do that one more time.

Cut into the tail, once you can feel the bone, feel free to take the knife back out and work above those two fins. Because it is a little bit tricky to get over that fin, you can see what I did, I went in and back over it, working my way along. I like to grip the head like that.

This is just the way I do it. I do find that if you use that part of the knife, use the tip to begin with, but the further down the fish you do, the more you should use the heel of the knife so that when you get to the end, you can really yank through and get that by using that part of the knife. Obviously, just cut around the head.

We have both fillets; we aren't quite done with it. Two more stages to this process. The first is that we need to take out the ribcage.

So I can do that like that. So, that's one and I will just do the other, which is the same sort of process. Again, just having a really flexible knife gives you the option of incorporating as much of the flesh as possible.

This you can use for stalk. The final thing is, if you run your finger, you will feel there are about six or seven bones which are called pin bones, one of which is normally at the very front, which people leave out. What you do is just go along and pluck them out like that.

If you try to use conventional tweezers, that just doesn't work, they are not robust enough. But if you use special dedicated fish tweezers, there is that bone I was talking about in the very front. You will find that you will be able to get them out.

I am just going to carry on and finish the job off. You can run your finger along and feel whether it is fillet or not. There you have it; that is how to fillet a fish. .