Let’s start from the beginning. How do you clean fresh fish for cooking?
Simple cleaning, steaking and filleting are the three basic methods of preparing a fish for cooking. Which method you use to clean a fish depends on the type of fish you have and how you want to cook it. This fish cleaning tutorial assumes you just want to clean a small fresh fish to be baked or fried.
Obviously you need a nice sharp knife and plenty of water to clean your fish. Cleaning fish ain’t pretty - you can never have too much newspaper on hand. Gloves are good too, dishwashing or surgical gloves work great.
Before you begin to clean fresh fish, wash the fish in cold water to remove any fish slime.
After washing the fish in cold water, take the back of a knife and run the knife along the sides of the fish from tail to head. If the back of the knife moves smoothly over the body of the fish, you don’t need to remove any scales. If the back of the knife starts popping off the scales of the fish, keep scaling until your knife moves smoothly across the body of the fish. After you’ve scaled the fish, wash it off again in cold water to remove any lose scales.
Now for the good stuff. Turn the fish over and look for a small opening on the underbelly near the tail fin. Don’t ask what the opening is, just find it. Once you’ve found the anal opening of the fish (OK, so now you know what the opening is) stick the sharp knife into the opening and, cutting away from you, slit the fish along the full length of the body from the tail to the gills. Only cut through the fish skin and don’t cut any of the organs inside the body of the fish.
Once you’ve slit the fish on the underbelly, remove everything inside the fish completely. Remove everything including the thin red line that runs along the spine of the fish.
Remove the gills from your fish by ripping or cutting them out.
Once everything has been removed from the inside of the fish, wash the fish in cold water again.
Depending on your cooking and presentation preferences, you might want to leave the rest of the fish intact, or you might decide to remove the head, tail and fins. If you want to remove the head of the fish, cut the head off just below the gills. Cut the tail of the fish off where the tail is connected to the body. Cut the fins off by slicing slightly into the fish skin.
If you want to remove the dorsal fin of the fish, try cutting slightly into the skin on both sides of the fin, then pull the fin off from the tail end forwards. This is a good way to try to pull a few of the bones attached to the dorsal fin.
Repeat this process 20 times on a hot summer afternoon with bugs and flies nipping at you and you’ll be an expert for life.