John,Thanks for your generosity & the demo the other night. I certainly appreciate it. Our family had a beautiful fish dinner of walleye & crappie Sun. night. Every piece of fish was consumed. They were excellent. Our 1 yr old grandaughter loves fish. She had her first boatride on Saratoga Lake yesterday, what a joy. I'll be talkin to ya GJ
I hope these pictures come out okay. Take your fish in this case an eye and make a cut from the top along the back of the gill to the bottom.[/img][/img]Next make a cut along the back and down one side of the fish from head to tail.[/img][/img]Turn the fish over and repeat on the other side.[/img][/img][/img]Then just start filleting the sides off of the fish keeping the knife as close to the ribs as you can so you leave nothing on the fish. This takes years of practice to master but once mastered you waste no fish.[/img][/img][/img][/img][/img]You just do the same on the other side and you have your 2 fillets skin on.[/img]Now you just lay the fillet flat and take the skin off.[/img]Do that with both fillets and then we can zip em. You make two cuts from the tail section parralel to the bone or mud line about 2 inches long and then just zip the sides off the bone line.[/img][/img][/img]When you are done you have the top and bottom sections of each fillet so one fillet becomes 2 pieces which are completely boneless and minus the nasty mud line.[/img]I hope this is okay and most of us know all this but it's for someone who may be new to filleting fish. With small fish you don't want to zip the bone line out there's no need just cut the first 3 or 4 inches out of the fillet from the thick part down and leave the mudline part in by the tail. Small fish have small bones so it's not a problem.
It's all about maximum taste and that's why I also keep fish from lakes that are nice and clean to get what I call "sushi grade walleye" which is the best. There are only 2 lakes in our area where you can get these walleyes that taste every bit as good as any Canadian lake walleye and one of those lakes is Sacandaga and you know the other one cfish it's called @#$%!@@$%^.
Slipbob, thanks for the pictures on cleaning walleyes by the "zipper" method . Last spring one of my buddies showed me that method .Later that summer ,up at Lac Seul(about 40 miles north of here) that method sure came in handy cleaning and eating all the 'eyes we kept.( I never threw back so many over-slot size fish back in my life )I do the "zipper" a bit different....but not by much.Just wanted to tell you thanks for sharing .