Greasy, tender herring is good both in salads and as an independent snack. To prepare dishes from this fish, it is usually recommended to take a whole herring. With a convenient chopping knife on hand, you can quickly sort the fish into neat pieces of fillet.
Pick your recipe
You will need
- - herring;
- - knife;
- - fish tweezers.
Instruction manual
1
Rinse the fish, dry it with a paper towel and place it on a cutting board covered with clean paper.
2
Cut off the herring head. It is more convenient to do this by putting the fish sideways on a cutting board, bending the fins and putting the knife blade at an acute angle to the carcass. Make an oblique incision to the spine.
3
Flip the carcass to the other side. Make a second oblique incision and cut the spine. As a result, the flesh, which would be cut and thrown together with the herring head, remained on the carcass.
4
Cut off the lower part of the abdomen with a width of about half a centimeter along with the ventral fins. This is a rather fatty part of the fish, but if the herring is of high quality, the cut abdomen can be cleaned and used in cold appetizers.
5
Take out the insides and remove the skin from the herring. It is more convenient to remove the skin by picking it up near the head, or rather, near the place where it was. The dorsal fin will not allow to remove the skin on both sides in one piece, so pull it from one side, then from the other.
6
Remove the dorsal fin and scrape the dark film from the herring abdomen with a knife. Fold the paper along with the entrails and discard it.
7
Hands separate one half of the fillet. It is more convenient to separate the herring along the back, starting from the head. In this case, try not to tear off the ribs from the spine, but to shift the flesh from them. Separate the spine with the tail from the remaining half of the fillet.
8
Pull out the remaining rib bones with fish forceps. This is convenient to do by bending the fillet half up with the side that was inside the abdomen. The filet is ready, it can be cut into slices, as required by the recipe for the dish you are going to cook.
Useful advice
To prevent hands, a knife and a cutting board after cooking the fillet from smelling of herring, wipe your hands and dishes with a solution of table vinegar prepared at the rate of half a tablespoon of vinegar per liter of water. You can wipe the dishes with a slice of lemon, it also helps get rid of the herring smell.