How To Fillet Crappie With Bryan Brasher

Hi, I’m Brian Brasher with Go Out{side} and we’ve been talking a little bit about crappie fishing. We’re talking about 3 essential parts of crappie fishing. Basically, first is catching. We’ve done that. We’ve got a cooler full. The second is cleaning the fish. That’s what we want to talk about now. It’s much easier than a lot of people think. We’ve got our fillet board here just to provide a flat surface. Got an electric filet knife- cordless so you don’t have to mess with any extension cord in the way..  we’re going to– we’re going to make two incisions on the outside of the gills on each side of the fish.

Don’t have to worry about messing anything up in there, that’s not part of the meat that you’re going to eat.

Once you’ve got those incisions made, you’re going to find the backbone.

And cut it right down the backbone of the fish.

All the way down to the tail.

So you want to separated it– You got your meat here. Got your bones here. You want to continue separating.

We are going to separate until you get down over that rib cage.

Then you want to lay it out flat..

That’s the meat right there– that you’re going to batter. Throw in a pan and eventually eat. Now you want to make the next incision to separate that meat from the skin and the scales that are remaining–  so you don’t want to eat the skin in this case.

Once you do that–

You’ve got exactly what you’re going to need to eat– you’re going to repeat that on the other side of the fish. Repeat it for all the fish in the cooler, and then you’ll be ready for the best part of crappie fishing, which is eating fried fish and hush puppies.