occurred to me that i’ve done this many hundreds of times, and have also led instructionals on how to fillet fish that got good reviews. we all do this stuff differently, but putting heads together helps everybody. i’d be fired the first day in a commercial fish house for being slow as molasses, but i try not to waste anything if i can help it.
sheeps are tricky because they are shaped like big bream, so it’s an oddly shaped fillet to remove.
first, get you some foosh. you can’t have mine.
This one my dad netted for me on Friday along with a nice mess of others. Great trip with him, been doing it since the 80’s when rods were made of tree limbs and reels didn’t exist yet.
treat your fish like you want to eat them straight out of the water if that’s the plan. I make sure I have an ice slurry that they can actually breathe across their gills, that way the blood exchange cools them off as quickly as possible. i do think that clipping a gill and bleeding them would be beneficial too. my answer is to ice them well for a day before cutting them so that the blood can recede from the meat. sheep meat is so nice and clear/white that a blood stain kind of ruins the presentation.
once they’ve been super cold internally for at least a little while (but preferably 12-24hrs) i take them out of the cooler one at a time, blast the slime off with a hose, and fillet
you wanna flick out a couple scales from between the head and the dorsal fin, then put the knife blade in facing up and run a shallow cut on both sides that is as vertical as possible and traces the dorsal all the way to the base of the tail.
then extend that cut with the knife pointed down, carefully tracing the bones that lead from the spine up to the dorsal fin (“pterygiophores”). also extend the cut down the front to between the eyes, this is a place where a lot of folks miss meat!
then work each side down to the spinal column and rib cage, i stop here because cutting past the spinal column is usually where the fillet gets bloody if it’s going to, so i want to be ready to finish it off when i cut past there.
next I make the vertical cut behind the head, I go just underneath the skin where the scales change texture, then cut down the head and behind the gill plate. important to note here that you can actually angle the knife blade forward on the cut to get the meat underneath and behind the gill plate.
make small cuts as you pull each side from the spine, important to remember that it’s a cylinder so you’ll miss meat if you don’t follow the contours of a round object. you can extend the cut behind the rib cage all the way down to the anal fin, which will make it easier to remove it from the rib cage next.
now make the cut around the top of the rib cage. it’s hard to angle your hand and the knife blade that perpendicular to the fish, but lots of little slices and the fillet will start to peel off towards the back. once you get to the back of the rib cage, i make a strong cut to chop through the last few, which allows you to get an angle on the meat underneath and to the rear.
at this point i usually make a cut down the outside of the fish to the vent, so that i know it’ll come off instead of cutting into the guts from the underside. i also make sure that most of the bottom of the fillet is cut down to the anal fin and back to the tail so it comes off when the rib cage is freed
have to cut around both sides of the weird bony and fatty thing that sticks into the bottom fillet. if you don’t get around it, it can come out once the fillet is removed
skin the fillet without putting so much pressure that you remove the red meat up against the skin along the lateral line, this part is a matter of feel and you can trim most of it off later too
the last step is to get the red meat and rib bones out of the center line, so i make a cut down both sides and then sort of butterfly it out at the bottom to get the red off
