How to Fillet Fish: Re-Making the Soy-Caramel Fish Recipe from Becky Selengut’s “Good Fish”

I made this recipe over Christmas for the first time and loved it. It’s from Becky Selengut’s sustainable seafood cookbook, Good Fish: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the Pacific Coast. It’s so simple. you just roast a bunch of things. Big pile of cabbage topped with a quarter of tomato, salt, pepper, jalapeno slices, sesame oil (peanut oil), and rice vinegar if my memory is correct. Then add the fish right on top and a layer of soy-caramel sauce (a simple five-minute sauce of butter, sake and soy).

The chopping is easy and if you buy the fish filleted that part’s easy too. Me, I rarely do things the easy way. I bought whole mackerel from Poissonerie La Mer (the only place I’ve seen Quebec mackerel for sale, but maybe Odessa has it too) and wanted to fillet them myself. Having watched Becky Selengut’s videos on how to fillet I felt more than prepared to take on the task, and so can you.

Why fillet your own fish when the fishmonger can do it for you? Even the seafood counter at your grocery store will do it if you ask, but they usually take off a little more than I like, and with a fish as small as these mackerel I’d end up paying $12 for no fish!

Note: You can ask them to fillet it and then ask to keep the skin and bones to make stock yourself, making it less wasteful, but your recipe will still be low on the amount of actual fish. I made it with mackerel because it’s one of the only sustainable options in the whole city it seems…AND it’s local. That’s probably why it’s not a big fish here. If it were bigger more people would fish it and it’d probably be overfished. Lucky for us?

Get on with it, Amie.

So how did my first filleting experience go? Great! I left the skin on as the recipe said, so that was easy. Smaller fish are harder to skin because cutting a little too deep can be a disaster, but the filleting part was easy.

Well, you have to get over the fact that guts fall out of it and you need to clean then out with your fingers, but that’s life if you’re an animal eater. I feel better about eating the fish (though I didn’t feel badly before…) knowing that I’m okay butchering it myself – a little accomplished, even. I cut just behind the gills and removed the dorsal fin (I think it’s called). And the vertebrae even came out very easily! I didn’t have to be too, too careful as I would with a salmon or other larger fish I’ve massacred in past lives.

So now you can share in my filleting joy! Next step, skinning and deboning larger fish, but that might not happen for awhile, since you can’t get those sustainably round these parts unless you’re chucking out change for a $40 Alaskan black cod…which I’m clearly not.