How To Fillet Mackerel

Hi there, I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School and today, I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Well, you, yes, you need to know how to fillet a mackerel so I'm going to show you how to do it. First thing you need is a very flexible fish knife.

If you don't have a very flexible one, don't worry it's not the end of the world. You definitely want it to be sharp. So, using a flexible knife, what you do is slide that knife all the way along the backbone and then just cut it off at the head.

It really is that simple. You take the guts out there and then just do the other side as well. Slide the knife along, it's going to be tidied off at the end, there we go and a useful tip is just try, and when you get to the halfway point, try and use the last part or the heel of the knife because you can really get a proper purchase to what you are doing.

There we have our two fillets. Now, the job is quite not finished. Here's what we need to do now.

Just cut out the rib cage, it's there, just look at that, do it on the other side as well. You cut that down like that and then there are a series of bones that run along here. Now, there are two ways of getting them out.

You can either use tweezers to pluck them out or my preferred way because it is much quicker, you don't really lose that much fish, is just to slice out any thin bones that are just along here. I'll soon do the other one as well. So, we have got our fillets there and as I say, although we have taken out the relevant fish, I do find the mackerel plucking them out with tweezers is much harder and this is a simpler way of doing it.

But you know for my money, there you have half a fillet mackerel. .