Saturday, March 1, 2008

Striped Bass

For all of you who like to fish, this will probably be useful, but then again, if you fish, you probably already know how to prepare a fish. This is obviously cheaper than buying prepared filets as well, so if you can find whole fish, then I guess you can save some money.

Whole fish means fish right out of the water. Drawn = gutted, scaled, dressed = gutted, scaled and filleted, pan-dressed = gutted, scaled, filleted and skinned (i.e. ready for the pan).

Here we go.


You want to use a boning knife for this one. It is very thin with a good point.














Make an incision just up from the tail and cut up to right behind the lower jaw.











































Then pull out all the guts. They should be really easy to get out; if you can't pull them out, you can cut them out.












Then grab the fin on the side, and make an incision angled forward down towards the spine. Cut halfway through the body.












Flip the fish over and do the same thing again, this time cutting through the spine.




























This should separate the head from the rest of the body.













To cut a fillet off, start just up from the spine, and keep the knife against the spine, and move the knife towards the tail.

You don't want to cut through the rib bones, so keep your knife above the ribs.







































When you get halfway to the tail, the ribs end, so cut through the rest of the body, and then cut all the way down to the tail.












Now separate the fillet from the ribs. Gently pull the meat away as you cut it away from the ribs.

























































And here's the fillet.














Do the same thing with the other side of the fish.

























































































Here's the leftovers. You can make stock with everything but the head.













To skin the fillets, start near the tail, just through the flesh just to the skin.




























Lay the knife flat, just above the skin. Then hold the skin near the tail and slide your knife gently the whole length of the fillet.










































Do the same thing with the other side.












































And there's the skin separated from the fillets.






























Here's a good dish: Ginger miso crusted Striped Bass with Shiitake Mushroom Broth.


3 comments:

Derek said...

i'm generally not much of a fish eater but that looks gooood.

i also like that you propped up the chopped off fish head so that it looked like it was watching the entire process.

Kino said...

I'd like to see you race my dad.

Anonymous said...

Looks yummy! Do you have a recipe for the Ginger miso crusted Striped Bass with Shiitake Mushroom Broth?