How to make every scrap count when filleting your fish

When you fillet a fish, how much meat do you actually get?

How to make every scrap count when filleting your fishIt might surprise and disappoint you to find that, with smaller snapper, the skinned, boned fillets weigh less than one third of the whole fish’s original weight. This means two thirds of the fish is potentially wasted.

Ideally, you eat as much of the fish as possible. This should result in taking fewer fish from the sea, and will also expand your abilities in the kitchen, impressing friends and family.

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With this in mind, I began to experiment with ways of increasing the yield from my hard-won catch. None of these techniques is revolutionary, I’ve picked them up from other fishos, cookery books, websites etc. I hope they will give you some pointers for getting the most out of your fish.

Fish mince

How to make every scrap count when filleting your fishThis is one of the easiest techniques for making a catch stretch further. Having filleted a fish, take a teaspoon and scrape the frame bare of every last scrap of meat. You can push right up into the forehead, and also scoop down over the ribs. The result is a small heap of delicious, tender mince. This meat from next to the bone holds the most flavour. While you don’t get a huge amount from a smaller fish, if you’re cleaning a few, this rapidly piles up. It freezes well, and if you are only catching one or two fish each outing, you can partly fill a ziplock bag, and add fresh mince to it as you clean later fish.

One thing to watch for is scales, but a careful sift through with clean hands will pick up most of them. You’ll get a bit of blood in the mince, but of course this is perfectly safe and tasty. Mixing mince from several different species is fine, too.

I use this mince to make fishcakes, adapted from Al Brown and Steve Logan’s Waikanae crab cakes in their book Hunger for the Wild. This one of my household’s favourite Sunday breakfasts, especially with the same tartare sauce used in the Logan-Brown book. I’ve also fried it with garlic and parsley and spread it on toast, with great results. I’m pretty sure you could make pasta dishes, tortillas etc with it, too. Finally, having it raw (tartare or sashimi) would have to be worth a go. For these dishes you’d want to make sure it was super-fresh, and if your diners are squeamish,rinse out the blood in a bowl of cold salted water!

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Baked head & throats

How to make every scrap count when filleting your fishThere’s a lot of meat in the heads and flaps (aka ‘wings’) of most fish, but it can be pretty fiddly to get at. Cooking it makes it easily accessible. This meat, especially around the head, is especially moist and flavourful, and I value it so highly that I wouldn’t dream of discarding heads intact. My preferred method is simple: put the heads in an oven dish and bake at 180°C uncovered for 15-20 minutes. Because the meat is protected by the skin, it retains its moisture. Check that the meat is cooked to the bone with a knife, then allow to cool. Breaking down the heads is now easy, aided by a fork. The resulting cooked meat can be used in mornays, salads, soups, or eaten with tartare sauce on fresh bread etc.

I usually scoop out the eyes and eat them on the spot, but this probably going a bit far for many. You can eat the crisped fins like chips too if you fancy.

Stock

How to make every scrap count when filleting your fishWith the pile of bones and skin left from the baking process, you can produce a rich and delicious stock. The fact that you’ve already removed the meat doesn’t seem to adversely affect the flavour or strength of the stock. As so much flavour is locked in the bones, skin and jellyish fat close to the bone, the resulting stock tastes fit for a king. The stocks I make usually include a chopped onion, a stick of celery and the leaves, a couple of cloves of garlic, thyme stalks, bay leaves and peppercorns, but often other excess vegetables and herbs find their way in too without destroying the flavour.

The method is simple: put the fish heads and other ingredients into a large pot and cover with cold water, then bring to a gentle simmer. Let it simmer away for 30 or so minutes, until the skull and bone structure collapses. A classic NZ fish cooking book, which is still in print, Noel Holmes’ Hook it and Cook it tells of a friend who then takes the pot outside and bludgeons the bones to smithereens with a broken tiller! This is supposed to release the last few precious fish molecules from the bones, but I find a good dig with a wooden spoon does the trick. Strain the liquid from the pot and set it aside to cool. It freezes well. I find my stocks usually turn to a type of jelly, which books don’t describe. Nonetheless, they taste superb, and a bit of heat liquefies them in minutes.

The stock can be used as the base for various soups or risotto etc. My personal favourite is a chowder, adding the meat taken from the heads at the last moment before serving, so that it’s heated through but not overcooked. Because the meat is already cooked, you don’t want to add it too early, or it will disintegrate.

Cheeks and eyebrows

How to make every scrap count when filleting your fishIf you remove the cheek-plate of a fish, you’ll find the best meat of the whole animal in a convenient bite-sized (depending on the size of fish) nugget. A friend from the fishing.net put me onto this and I haven’t looked back. Separating the plate takes a bit of practice, but as always, a sharp and flexible knife makes life a lot easier. The muscle continues up to level with the top of the eyeball, and down to the snout area. Once the plate is removed, you’ll see the meat exposed. With the point of your knife, follow the edges of the cheek meat to separate the flesh from the bone.

On larger fish like kings and big snapper, you can also slice out a fat finger of meat from above each eye. I would suspect that big fish like ‘puka, tuna, marlin etc. have a huge amount of meat in this area, but my humble rock fishing around Auckland has yet to produce these species to experiment with.

The cheek muscles are shaped like scallops and would lend themselves well to scallop recipes. I generally just roll them in flour and fry them as they are (which is a good scallop technique too, come to think of it).

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Guts and all

How to make every scrap count when filleting your fishEating the organs of fish is a step too far for many. The appearance and smell is enough for most to tear them out and bin them or chuck them to the gulls. If you are especially brave, you might eat the roe.

One neglected and not too off-putting place to start, however, is the liver. This brownish organ is near the front of the stomach cavity, which can vary hugely in shape and size between species and even within the same species. John dory livers are enormous, while two snapper of the same length and weight can have livers of wildly different sizes. My first experiment with eating livers was with kahawai, and I remember thinking at the time that they looked like blood-covered slugs! I simply fried them as they were, with a bit of Kaitaia Fire tabasco sauce on toasted brown bread. The result was sensational, and liver on toast is now a favourite snack of mine.

I recommend chopping the liver finely and mixing it with finely sliced chives or onion, plus salt and pepper and hot sauce or lemon juice. A kingfish liver did me right for after-work snacks for three days running.

Date	Species	Length (cm)	Raw weight (kg)	Fillets (kg)	%Roe (eggs) is excellent food, even if it means eating future millions. Better to use them though than send them to a landfill. I like to fry roe and eat it spread it on toast, or smoke it until it has cooked through, then slice it into ‘coins’ and mix it into a salad. A Japanese friend tells me that fish stomach is sashimied in Japan. He said the gut is sliced open, rinsed, then scrubbed with coarse salt, sliced and eaten with wasabi and soy. This is something I have yet to try, but is on my ‘to eat’ list.

From a recent mission, a friend and I ended up with – in addition to a big stack of fillets to eat fresh and be frozen – six fat bags of fresh ‘other’ meat. These were cheeks, mince, livers, roe and, finally, milt. If you don’t know this last one, it’s the equivalent of mammalian sperm. Evidently this is a delicacy in Sicily and Japan (where it’s re-labelled as ‘white children’). As yet I haven’t eaten my white children, but my mate and his missus ate theirs fried on toast, and said it was excellent. For me this is the final frontier of sustainable fish cookery, and I’m still 50/50. I may end up trying it in the berley pot, so at least it might indirectly provide another meal!

This table shows the return you get from pannies when filleting them in the traditional way. Interestingly, you get a better return from larger snapper. The return from a big john dory was excellent.

Make every scrap count when filleting your fish


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This article is reproduced with express permission of
NZ Fishing News

written by Tom Lusk - 2011
Re-publishing elsewhere is prohibited

Originally published in New Zealand Fishing News

 

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