How to skin and fillet a flat fish

In this video, I'm going to show you how to skin and fillet a flat fish. We've got a Dover sole, we’ve got two sides a brown side and the underside which is always white, to skin a sole take in the tail with a sharp knife you cut through the skin not through the bone, just enough to start peeling the skin back, once you’ve got the skin coming off, use in a clean J-cloth hold the tail in one hand very gently pull the skin, the reason I’m using a J-cloth is because obviously the skin is a little bit slippery, but you need to do it as gently as possible to ensure you don’t rip the flash, as you come up to all the head-end turn the skin a little bit, there you have it the skin is removed are there’s your fillet, you can just see it one there and one there, we turn the fish over exactly the same on the opposite side with the white skin, so there we have we have our skinned fish ready for filleting.

The next step is for the filleting I'm going to remove the head just makes it easy to get the fillets off, so on the larger fillet not where the belly was, just go down through the spine, flip the fish around to remove the head and the head we keep for stock later, so you can see clearly the backbone of the fish with a sharp knife we cut down the backbone then using a pliable knife we’re just going to gently cut the fillets off the bone nice smooth stroke so that we don't get jagged lines on the fillet, if the row is there just gently prise that away there’s our first fillet remove the row, on the opposite side you go from the tail so up along that spine and done and so you can see you got the bones, that’s the spine that you need to cut over on the round fish, flip the fish over exactly the same process and down the back line through to remove the third fillet.

We’ve got one final fillet to remove, the bones we’ll retain later to make fish stock, next step is to trim the fillets so place the fillets skin side down on your board and you've got a natural break which we call the frills the in the actual fillet, see that line just appearing run your finger across it and it should separate, if it doesn't just with a tip of a knife trim it off, snip the very end of your fillet and you’ve got one trimmed fillet, again all the trimmings will be kept for the stock, exactly the same on this side to the natural break with the frills, snip the tail and there we have our four fillets of Dover sole.

Find your next job as a Head Chef here.