To fillet a whole fish first start off with your fish and lay it on your cutting board.
Here we have a tilapia. Usually the fish that you buy have already been gutted especially
the ones you buy in the grocery store. That just means all of the innards have been removed
from inside of the fish. Now with your fillet knife you want to make sure that you have
a nice flexible fillet knife. We're going to find your fin here right by the head and
we're going to cut around the head to loosen up that piece of the fillet. You want to make sure you cut all the way
down to the bone, but don't cut through the bone. Once you do that we're going to find
the top fin and we're going to cut around the top fin. Now once you do that you can get your finger
underneath the fillet and cut in a little bit deeper. Just keep on cutting through.
Once you get about half way through the fillet we're going to go ahead and take our knife
all the way through the fillet and cut all the way down.
Once you have one side done we're going to flip it over and we're going to do the same
thing to the other side. Once you have your two fillets you'll still have the carcass
of the fish. Depending on the type of fish that you have you can save the carcass for
later to make fish stock. If it's an oilier fish you may not want to save it for fish
stock. That is how you fillet fish.
