Good afternoon, so the purpose of this
fabrication demo  is to show you how
to properly break down a piece of fish.
What I have in front of me here
is a beautiful piece of beautiful whole
king salmon,
and what I'm going to do is remove one
fillet and I've
started with a clean dry surface
you want to cut behind
the dorsal fin okay sharp knife
boning knife is preferable, once you get
down to the to the spine let the knife
do the work for you go ahead stop and
then you want to turn your knife toward
the tail and then continue to cut using
your I'm right handed so I'm using my
left hand to gently hold the fish in
place and I'm running my knife down the
spine all the way to
the tail
okay
so
I've went ahead and removed the first
fillet there what I'm gonna go ahead and
do is turn this fish around and I'm
going to do the same thing on the
opposite side and it's important that
you go ahead and remove these fillets
from the carcass get that carcass out of
the way
always want to make sure that your
utensils your hands are dry and clean
safety is everything okay again just
behind that dorsal fin all the
way to the spine and then toward
the tail you should hear a
little cracking if you do it right that is.
now this is a large piece
of fish so just take your time with it
don't cut yourself if you have to come
down the opposite side get that skin it
can be tough go ahead and do that okay
there are quite a bit of pin bones in
this fish and that's okay yes we're
going to come back around we're gonna
remove this remove these pin bones okay
if your fish kind of does that to you it
kind of breaks up on you that's okay
that will happen that will happen from
time to time okay
usually when you're fabricating fish as
you'll see usually one side will
give you a little bit more trouble than
the other side but that's okay
No sense of panic, what I'm doing is
I'm just removing some of that belly fat
and those bones
okay the ribs from this carcass from the
excuse me from the fillet and then I
will come back and I will dress this
fillet up no sense in rushing, panicking
that's how you get hurt
that's how mistakes happen so with this
carcass should be as clean as
possible what you could do, is take a spoon and you can
scrape this excess meat off of the spine
and you could use that meat for
croquettes
you know fish balls, things like that
okay fish cake, etc...
similar to a crab cake only you're using
the salmon. I'm not going to do
that for this application the other
thing you can do is with this carcass
you can save it and make a fish stock
which is classically known as a
fish fumet
okay so go ahead and discard this
fillet here, excuse me this
carcass okay again want to make sure
that your your board stays dry and as
clean as possible, the first filet that we did
okay it still has the skin
on so again before I remove the skin
from this  salmon from this king
salmon this beautiful piece of king
salmon I'm gonna go ahead and remove the
ribs okay I'm gonna do so by cutting on
a bias at a 45-degree angle from the
head to the tail then all those
ribs and all that fat all that stuff
will just come right off
what you'll have left is you have
this nice clean bottom portion of your
of your fillet okay we could also use
this and you're in your fish fumet
you'd obviously want to trim off these
fins below here as well okay any
bones or dorsal fin bones you have
up top go ahead in the same motion about
a 45-degree angle cutting on a bias go
ahead and remove those you want to do
this I would recommend doing this when
the skin is still intact
with the flesh because it helps to hold it
together okay you know I mean you could
but your fillet is gonna be a
lot more delicate once you take the skin
off and you just have that meat so you
want to kind of keep it intact and a
good trick for me that I found is
leaving that skin on and then do as much
of the fabrication that you can with the
exception of the pin bones
okay the pin bones I'm gonna actually
remove once I take the skin off okay so
that parts done now I'm going to take
the underside off the skin and there's
nothing wrong there's nothing wrong with
this skin okay but the preparation that
I want is I want a skinless clean salmon
fillet but you could leave this skin on
you'd want to scale it make sure there's
no scales on there and then you can make
a nice crispy pan-seared salmon nice
crispy skin it would be delicious
there's certainly nothing wrong with
that nothing wrong with that okay so
what you want to do is take this fillet
here bring it to you, work closer
to you rather than away and then you
utilize your cutting board and your surface okay you want to go
ahead and start from the tail and then
work your way all the way to the head
okay and then what you're going to do
the motion that you want is you're going
to have your boning knife flush on your
cutting board and then you're gonna
you're going to pull with your opposite
hand and then your dominant hand you're
going to drag or gently slice
all the way down the skin from tail to head
to remove that skin and then what you're
gonna have is you're gonna have a clean
skin like finish and then you're going
to have as much with this meat intact on
this place as you possibly can okay
so I'm gonna do that by starting a
little a little incision okay I'm not
going all the way through the skin just
to the skin
okay a little flap if you will this fish
is slimy okay it is slimy there's a lot
of moisture here so one trick is you can
grab the tail with the paper towel okay
and then you go ahead and start slicing
gently okay and if you're working with a
big piece of filet like I am okay you
might have to do this in two two
sections
obviously it would be much easier if you
if you had a smaller piece of fish okay
and then all this skin that's left we're
gonna go ahead add this to our scraps
pile here.
you want to bring the product to you I still
have some more bones here on
top I'm just gonna go ahead like I did
earlier on the rib cage so we're gonna
go ahead and remove the some of those
bones
with my boning knife.
Can I get some more paper towels chef?
Alright, so if you came up close and you ran your
fingers across the flesh from head
to tail you'd feel the bones you'd
feel the bones the pin bones that feel
like little like little pieces of
sandpaper kind of rubbing against the
tip of your finger okay
so these bones they're going they're
going toward the head so you always want
to remove the pin bones in the manner in
which they are and the manner in which
they're going so they're going toward
the head so you want to pull in that
direction if you start pulling toward
the tail you're going to you're going to
tear up this meat so what I have here is I
have my handy dandy fish pliers, fishbone pliers in the shape of a fish
it looks like a fish, get a closeup of that. You want to go ahead and remove these pin bones
now in a large piece of fish like this
they're going to be large see that's
that's officially a contaminant that you
learn in your servsafe class okay
that's a choking hazard okay no fun so
you want to make sure that all those
bones are removed
and there's quite a few in this
fillet depending upon how close you get
to this spine when you're removing your your fillet from
the from the carcass, from the whole fish
so I'm going to go ahead and remove some of
this excess bones here on the
side and then another thing you need to
remember that you do is is you remove
this some this blood line here okay
that's as simple as running your
knife down the spine on the side of the
spine
tail the head.
We want to dress this up and have it as
clean as possible before you
you portion it and that's exactly what
I'm trying to do here
this excess there's nothing wrong with
the salmon here this excess salmon okay
this can be ground up with that that
residual meat that would be left on the
on the side of the fish after you took
 the fillets off
and then you could add that to make your
fish cake grind it up. If you've ever
had a crab cake, it's a
similar process only you're using fish
instead of crab. So what I'm going to
go ahead and do now is I'm going to go in
and portion this out okay
I'm going to portion this out I'm not
going to use a scale I want to go ahead
and just go off of just go off of
intuition here and portion these 
probably about two inches
to two and a half inches wide this
is about a half an inch long piece of
salmon so I'm going to get about my 4
ounce for a half ounce piece of fish
okay with about two inches wide about an inch thick like they are
okay I've been doing this little while
but you could obviously if you're if
you're novice you could definitely have
a scale I recommend having a scale
cutting a portion and then weighing it
out and so all your pieces are uniform
and the reason why you want to do that
is it promotes an even cooking okay even
cooking across the board so you don't
have overcooked piece of the fish or
you're not serving somebody's sashimi
okay when they're when they're expecting
baked salmon baked/broiled salmon.
there you have
your
prepared salmon fillets, king salmon
fillets.
