How to Fillet Striped Bass

Hey, everybody. Jimmy Kennedy with Go Out{side}. We’re down here on Cape Cod today, and we had a lot of luck fishing for my second time in a kayak first time was yesterday, so it was pretty exciting. And you did great.

Thank you, man. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate you taking me out. And Dan here is a pro staff of Van Hunk’s boarding and he loaned me one of his kayaks. And it’s just been a blast. I mean, it’s been so much fun. We caught some nice fish. Very good. Yeah. 28, 32-inch fish got into them really good today.

And we kept a couple, we released most of them. But as a chef, I decided we’d keep a couple. And I think you agree that we’re going to cook a little. Yeah, and a little lemon of course, and garlic butter. But Dan’s going to cut these up for you guys. We’re going to video this.

And it’s much like any other species of fish, but we’re going to I don’t know, it’s just so much fish on these things. We thought it’d be a good idea to do a video, lots of meat. Lots of meat. We’re going to keep the carcass. We’re going to make probably some type of soup chowder with that and probably have a recipe for that too.

One thing I’m going to add was Jimmy Kennedy was a little worried about being in his kayak. It’s a little rubber boat and he’s used to the big boats as his boating skills transferred straight over to the kayak.
Thank you, man. It’s not the Skeeter, but it was a lot of fun.

You did great on it. Thank you. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to come back and try it again. Oh, I hope now for sure. All right. We’ll show you that.

You know, striped bass are shaped like any other fish. They have a particular rib cage. So I’m going to just demonstrate how to cut into one of these fish. You got to get under the scale, and start right behind the head. And I like to make this initial cut all the way through. And this one goes along the backbone. And so you just ride this backbone all the way along until you get somewhere around the middle, just pass the middle.
And I like to shoot for the whole rib cage and I go right to the bottom, the backbone that is, and I just go right to the end. Most guys like to leave the tail on. I cut the tail off. I like to get that out of there. And then I just come back and follow this ribcage.

The bone right to the back there, and I go all the way to the back and just keep right on going. And I hit this rib cage. This rib cage rises up. So you got to come up around the edge of it right there. Like all fish, they have a rib cage in which the bass is a particular shape.

So you just follow that rib cage along. Done. And this is the way I like to do when I pull the skin off, we don’t leave the skin on stripers. They have a lot of scales. I flip open the skin there, give myself a thumb pole, and stick my finger in there without cutting it off, of course. And then I just basically slide the fish out.

You look at that leather, that’s pretty cool. And I got most of the meat. This was striped bass. Looks like beautiful white fish. Looks great. There we go.

Thanks for that Dan that looks great and can’t wait to eat it. Yeah, you did a pretty good job on that, man.

I thank you guys and hopefully, we’ll have some recipes with this striped bass and Go Out{side}.

So I’m so glad you came up.
To me, too, man. See you guys.