Hi folks, it's Ivo from Thundermist Lure Company. And today I am going to show you a good method on how to clean bass. It can be any bass: a smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, strait bass, sea bass, doesn't matter. It's a good method. And I am also going to show you what to do to make your fillet taste better.
So simple demonstration here, and let's start with this small bass here, which is about a pound-and-a-half, which is actually a nice little size to bring home for the table. And basically, cut behind the neck, like so. Turn the fish, cut behind the neck on the other side, just like that. And then run your knife along the top fin here, just on the inside of the top fin, all the way to the back, like that. And then turn the fish, and do the same thing to the other side. Take your knife, and once you get it started there, you just run it along, like so.
Now, with your fish in this position, just take your knife and run it right along that bone. This has one bone right up the middle, and it has the ribcage here. So you just take the knife and run it along the bone until you hit the ribcage, and now you can feel me going around the ribcage here, like that. Once you get around the ribcage, just poke it right through and bring it right along to the back of the tail, like that.
Now, do not remove this fillet, that is one tip, leave that fillet on there, because what it does, it helps balance off your fish and allows you to remove the other fillet very easily. Typically what would happen is, if you take the other fillet off, you will find that you will cut through these bones instead of alongside them. So you can see here, I have cut all the way to the ribcage, so just go behind the ribcage like that, and again, right to the back of the tail. Now you are okay to remove your fillets.
So just cut to the ribcage and then cut around the ribcage, and then down along the side of the ribcage, like that. So you end up with the fillet looking something like that.
Turn your fish, same thing on the other side. Okay? You can see here where the ribcage is, just cut around the ribcage, that way there is no bones, just like that, and make an incision and cut around, like so. So there you have two boneless fillets.
Now, what I am going to show you, typically what you would do is you would run your knife along between the skin and the fillet. Oops, almost lost it. And just, you run it, like so, and now you remove the skin. So there you have one boneless fillet.
With this one what I am going to do is I am going to stay off of the skin, just about 16th of an inch, and I will show you and I will tell you why, and I come across like that. So I have left a very, very little bit of meat here. But the meat I have left is this dark muscle meat. That dark muscle meat actually is not very good, it tastes terrible. So you can see on this fillet the only dark muscle meat that is left is that one little strip, all the rest has been removed.
So with any fish you clean, get rid of that dark muscle meat. Bluefish in particular, they have a lot of dark muscle meat, but remove it and the fish will taste much better.
Also, I will tell you one more thing. This fish actually took my bait deep and was bleeding, so I could not release him. So you can see here, there is actually no blood in the fillet, it's very clean and very white.
This fish, I cleaned a few minutes ago, did not bleed, and look at the difference in the fillets. This one here will also taste ten times better than this one, because this one has so much blood in it. So if you have a fillet like this, make sure you wash it very, very well, remove as much blood as you can, and it will taste ten times better.
So the only other thing I could do with this fillet is remove some of the fat, and you could see here there is some fat right here. It's a little bit of a white meat, little bit discolored, just remove that little bit of fat, discard that, and you will find it here around the belly, and you will also find it along the top here. This one doesn't have any. So basically that's it. That is one nice looking fillet, which will do you well, and serve as a nice table fair for you and your family, which by the way, they do recommend eating fish once to twice a week. It's very healthy, very good for you, and I suggest if you get an opportunity to do so, bon appétit, and do just that.
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