HALIBUT BREAKDOWN

I'm Jojo. I'm the executive chef of Soiree in the Hotel Del Coronado and Lionfish in the Pendry Hotel. We're going to break down a local California halibut. We're going to start off right here, a little cut, being very gentle to go around the gills and the collar. We usually bring it all the way down to about right here, same thing with this. Come straight through the back and right through the backbone. Then we're going to flip it, we're going to do the same thing on this side. We're going to make that same cut, make sure everything is nice and loose through right here. Since we already removed the backbone, we're going to come through the collar, we're going to stick our finger in here, and we're going to remove these egg sacs. A lot of people will scale something to fillet it, but we're going to be dicing all the fillet. We're not going to use any of the skin. Now, take it all off in one piece. I start off by marking my tail on both sides, so I know I have an ending point. There's this line that follows all the way through right here to the backbone. You're going to go straight through right there. You're going to follow this line all the way back. What you're doing is you're running your knife along the spine bone, which are these little knuckles right here. Then we're going to run straight along the backbone. Long strokes, which you always want to do. Long strokes. So what I do is I go straight through his back piece, and I just follow my knife. There's one fillet. The only difference between this side is the rib cage on this. I break it through there. Same exact thing we did on that side, but I break it, and I'll push. Long strokes again. Back to those long strokes. Halibut is a two-sided fish, so most of the time there's fish that are round. This is a flat fish, but it's going to have loins on both sides of it. There's going to be four. There's going to be the spine bone that comes down this way. Same on the opposite side. So it's going to be pretty much twinned off on one side as the other. So run straight down the backbone, and then we're right back to that backbone. Now that we have that, we're going to do the exact same thing as we did on the other side. Long strokes. Break through this backbone again. I've used this thing for eight years. It's definitely not a cheap deba, but I actually got this at Corrin, and the guys at Corrin were like, you just butcher too much fish, pretty much, where they're like, you're better off just buying an American-style deba. I just use different knives for different tasks, obviously. This knife specifically, I like using Neenox. Their deba just feels better to me. I feel like they're really, really, really strong. I needed a workhorse deba because we blow through so much fish at both restaurants that this Neenox deba has just been the greatest knife I've ever had. There's Debra and there's Debbie. This is Debra right here. You could hurt somebody with this knife for sure. This you can use for stocks and stuff. Usually halibut's the best thing to use. These always are good for fumes because fumes, you want them to be nice and clean, not a lot of oil. Halibut doesn't have a lot of oil inside of it. Most of the time, you want to go against the grain when it comes to slicing, but if you go with the grain when it comes to skinning, you're going to get a lot closer. You're not going to lose as much meat. We have one fillet, but I usually loosen up this piece right here. This all just peels right off. You could cut right here too, like that, remove this rib cage. I'll cut it into pieces that I know that my knife are about the same size, that way it's just easier to dice like this. So what we do next, we salt the fish. A little bit of kosher sea salt. We let it sit in the fridge for about two to four hours, depending on how salty you want it. Salting the fish is curing the fish. What it's doing is it's adding salt to it and it's also drawing out some moisture. We're going to make our ceviche. In our marinade, we have coconut milk, lime juice, lemon juice, and a little bit of yuzu. You want to let this marinate for about an hour or so, so it kind of cures it a little bit more because of the acid. I like mine a little bit more on the raw side. Some people like it a little bit more on the cooked, but personally, I like mine raw. We're going to add cucumbers, avocado, and a little bit of picked cilantro, torn, squeeze of just a tiny bit of lemon, and we're going to mix. Now we're just going to plate it. We're going to finish it with a little bit of pickled chilies and onions, a couple sprigs of cilantro for some color, a tiny bit of sea salt, a little bit of blanched cilantro, oil, and we blend it until it's warm, which is oil, and let it drift through a coffee filter. We get corn tortilla chips, cook them over a wood grill until they're nice and crunchy, and dehydrate them for just a little bit in the oven. That's our start to finish, breaking down a halibut and turning it into ceviche here at Saraya.