A step-by-step guide to selecting fresh fish and then butchering it at home into beautiful clean fillets.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Salt Life | 2018-04-19 16:03:28 |  76,545 Views |
How to fillet a fish | Salt Life
The best—and frankly the only—way to get good at most things is to do them over and over and over again. And then do them again. And again. That’s one advantage restaurant chefs have over home cooks. In a single evening a chef can put out as many steaks roast chickens or pastas as most people do in a year. It’s one of the things I loved most about my time in restaurants when I could obsess over searing a fish fillet or poaching eggs for weeks until I got it right.
Unfortunately for me every restaurant I worked at always had a prep cook who slaughtered most of the fish which meant that the only time I had the chance to fillet a large batch of whole fish was when that guy wasn’t there. I became adept at it but not a master. Can I fillet a fish? Yes. Can I plow through twenty of them in under a minute without hitting a single fillet or losing a piece to the bone? No. I wish I could but those are the brakes.
But while it would be nice to have virtuoso skills in butchering fish it’s not a requirement for the home chef and shouldn’t stop you from trying it every now and then. After all at home we don’t work under the time pressure of a restaurant kitchen. We can take as long as we need to get it right.
