How To Fillet A Striped Bass

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How To Fillet A Striped Bass






 

[Introduction]

0:30 Announcer: Saltwaterfishing247.com helping you catch that fish of a lifetime.

0:43 Well, we're at the end of our day here. We decided to keep one fish for the grill, a lot of people asking for it so. We gotta filet him up here. We got our Timberline Montauk series filet knifes here. These are great knifes. I like them for a couple reasons. It is a very flexible blade and it's long. A lot of knives I've been using in the past are too short.

As you can see, this bass here is over 40 inches and he's really You get this knife, a good longer knife to clear through the whole fish as we go through is important. A lot of the blades are only six, eight inches. They come through here and you're struggling especially when we go later on when we skin the fish. This knife goes completely through it and does a great job.  

1:30 Basically, I have my Normark glove on because I'm always cutting myself because I'm not the best guy with a knife. And it's sharp. We just cut down through here to the backbone and just run the blade on top of the backbone and down. Just making a nice, even cut. You could feel the bone in the middle here. You want to stay on top of it. And poke it through, running all the way down on to the tail. And then back.

2:04 As you're coming back, you'll feel the backbone. As you get closer you'll also feel the ribcage. Right up in here. You want to work the blade around the ribcage. You can hear it right now. Kind of comes up and then it goes down. Then just run the blade right on down through. Voila.

2:38 Now we have the filet off you can see what I was feeling for here. This here is all bone. It's a ribcage. The fish's stomach is right inside there. As we came in with the blade we hit it. And then worked it, worked it and then as we got by it we cleared and then came all the way down. You can see on the filet here how the cutout is. That's pretty much natural for all the bass as that cut out there. This here is just like I said it's just all bone.

3:06 Alright now that we have our filet we're going to skin it. And this is where this knife is important also again. As you can see, it clearly is going to go through the whole fish without any problem. Normally what I do is take a little bit of the ends, cut down on it and get ahold of it with your hands like that. Get your thumb on there and just put pressure down and just work the knife back and forth, real simple. And you can see this knife clearly is going on both sides of this giant filet here we have. And we just work it all the way down...to the end. And voila. Perfect filet. And you repeat the other side of the fish.

3:45 Well now we got our fillet. The last thing we gotta do before we cut it up in sections and bag it, is we want to feel for any bones that we missed, especially in the rib cage area. You're always going to miss a couple. Now's the time you want to cut them out. And just go through with both your hands and you'll feel and squeeze it. For the most part these bones are pretty big and sharp. You're going to know it right away.

And actually I feel one right there. There's one that I missed right there. So I'll cut that out. We can hear it. It's still there. That's part of the rib cage we're just talking about. Beautiful. We got it all out so nobody will be choking on striper bones when we throw it on the grill later.

4:25 [Closing]

4:49 Announcer: Saltwaterfishing247.com helping you catch that fish of a lifetime.

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