Cutting Off the Top to Fillet a Flat Fish

Part of the Video Series Fish Recipes

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Learn how to cut the meat away from the scales and out of the bones of a flat fish, in this free cooking video series on making delicious fish recipes.

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Cutting Off the Top to Fillet a Flat Fish
Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to show you how to clean and fillet a flat fish. Today we got a gulf flounder here and a flat fish means exactly that usually the fish is going to have 2 eyes on the same side of its head and it is just going to be a flatter fillet. It is a little bit tricker to clean then the round fish and we have shown you a round fish actually a gulf red snapper in a previous video. So I'm going to go ahead and get started on this guy and I had him scaled at the fish market when I purchased him and this is going to facilitate the filleting of the fish because the knife is not going to have to fight against the scales and such. So I'm going to make a cut along the radio fins on each side and we are going to work our way into the middle. Now these are not so much cuts. The cuts that you make are just going through the skin of the fish and getting into the flesh but the rest of the filleting is really just shaving the bones from the meat itself. So I will show you that here in a second as we get a little bit further along and I'm just going to follow this radio bones and make a initial cut here it is kind of a guide. Alright. So I'm really just kind of using the tip of the knife up to this point. It always helps to have a really sharp fillet knife and this is the knife that I'm using is essentially a fillet knife that is actually called the sentry because it got a sweep to it and no heel and I find these knives are the easies to clean fish with. So I'm going to following these radio bones as I said before we are going to work our way in to the center. So I'm going to turn the fish this way and you would be able to see from this angle that I'm going to kind of hold my hand on my fish this way and keep the knife parallel with the cutting surface. I'm going to get him started and then I will turn him around to show you the exact radio bones that I'm following. So as you could see we got radio bones that are extended out to this point and they stop. So the initial cuts that I made where in the skin here and there's some cartilage and some lighter bones here that you could follow with the tip of the knife and I just started to show you to I hit the harder bones here and then came across the top of those. So essentially as I said shaving that flesh away into I get to the center, in the center bone is going to be round so it would just naturally stop at that point. I'm going to go ahead and cut through this way and back to the tail, now I will follow the center bone from the top and let the knife just fall down to the curve of that bone and follow the radio bones towards the base of this fish, I want to save the base of this fish it just kind of deceitful because it is a flat fish but I'm following the radio bones towards me now. So we could separate that fillet nice and easy and again I'm just shaving with my knife here. I have a whole lot of cutting going on here. Alright so this would be a good stop, stopping point to show you before and then after this is the before, again I started from the tip of the knife into the skin follow the radio bones, allow myself enough so I could pull it with my fingers as I shaved along, then hit the denser bones here and just came across the top of those followed it to the center bone that has a curve as I said before, cut this way back to the tail that way I could put my knife in this way just shave along the center bone and follow these radio bones all the way down. So we would have a really high yield and a nice pretty fillet there. So we would come back and show you the other side in just one second it is just a little bit tricker.

About the Expert

Expert: Louis Ortiz is a professional chef instructor at a culinary institute. He has been working in the culinary industry for 10 years. Read More