San-Mai Ni Orosu | Japanese Style Filleting | Seafood Recipes

What we do is, in Japanese it's called samai oroshi, which basically means to cut into three pieces. Right side of the fillet, left side fillet, then the actual bone itself. Now this is the way shiitake should be cut. If I was to shine light through the other side here, you'd probably be able to see right through it. And you see here, towards the tail, towards the It's not flat, it's actually curved like this, because what I'm doing is I'm leaving as much meat on the fillet as possible. Eight inch chef knife. And this is not a fancy $300 knife or $400 knife, this is a simple $21 knife. Knife honer, it's about five dollars. With this, all you do is And a pair of pin bone remover tweezers. They're just slightly bigger than the average eyebrow tweezer. That's all you need, three tools. You start off with cutting the head off. You lift the head up just a little bit, you'll see the collar. Put the knife right underneath, like so. Same thing with the other side, just lift it up a little bit and I'll separate the collar. First thing you want to do is make sure that this point of the knife becomes the very tip of your finger. So we align that with the backbone of the fish inside the stomach, and we pull right through just above the fin here. It'll hit the backbone and it won't go further. The second cut you're going to be doing is from the tail towards the head in a slight angle, just to pierce the skin. You can tell it's just the tip of the knife that's going in at a 45 degree angle, like so. After you do that, it just makes it easier for the knife to glide into. So from there, glide the knife through, and it'll automatically stop just by the backbone here. I'll put one more incision, then I place the knife in the reverse way towards the tail. Do not cut it off, you want this piece connected. Put your fingers underneath there, slide the knife through. That's what you want to hear. There you go. To do the other side, we flip the fish around. What we want to do is remove this fin next, like so. Place the knife in just under the bones, as you can see. Slide the knife again. Don't use any strength, your knife should slide. If you try to use strength, you end up breaking the meat, and that's what you don't want to do. Place the knife in an angle again, towards the cutting board, 45 degree angle, just slide it down. So you're piercing the skin, but not cutting deeply into the meat. As you can see, you can actually see the bones here. You want to place the knife right underneath the bones here. You can actually see the knife sliding underneath. What you want to do is have the meat still stuck to the skin, not to the bone. Place the knife in, cut this end off, and I will just slide the knife through. Removing the rib cage. Right underneath the rib cage, you just let it slide. It's almost like a hot knife through butter, you just glide the knife. Turning the fillet around, just makes it easier for me to go underneath the belly flap here, and I can actually see what I'm doing. Then the final step here, removing the excess of the belly flap. There is a fin here on the outside, and we'll be removing that from the inside. What we do is we just slide our knife just around that fin, slide it across again towards the tail, and voila, you have a sockeye fillet. What you want to do is you want to hold it like you're plucking eyebrows. Again, you don't want to force it into the meat, you want to just glide the bones out, and you can actually feel them. All you do is you just go in, you don't dig into the meat, and you just remove the bones. Once you get used to it, it goes quite easily, and there's approximately 40 bones on each side of the fish.