9 Cuts Of Fish, Explained

Part of a fillet's popularity is the lack of bones, making it easy to take the fish from the store to the table without much intervention on your part. The fillet process is relatively straightforward. You cut the fish along the back, on one side of the dorsal fins, then down through the meat, following the ribs until you reach the spine. Turning the knife flat, you break through the pin bones where they attach to the spine, then turn the blade downwards, slicing through the meat to separate the fillet from the skeleton. Then, you cut along the bottom ribs to separate the belly from the fillet, and you can remove the skin if you wish.

You still have to deal with the small pin bones at the head-end of the fillet, and there are even fillet cut choices to make. One way is to remove the bones with a V-Cut, running your knife down either side of the bones in a V-shape and just sliding that piece of meat with the bones away from the fillet. Another choice is the J-Cut, which starts with a V-Cut, but after removing the strip of boney meat, you continue and remove the thin flap of belly meat. A third, more economical way is to pull the pin bones out with a pair of pliers. You can now cut the boneless fillet into portions, if the size dictates, trying to keep them uniformly thick for even cooking.

The skeletal structure of some fish makes filleting impractical because the flesh doesn't lie flat against it, having a curved body shape. You can still arrive at a place where you have large, boneless pieces of fish to cut portions. Cutting loins rather than fillets is common with large fish, like tuna or swordfish.

To cut loins from a fish, you start by removing the dorsal and ventral (top and bottom) fins. In some cases, the cutter removes the belly before removing the loins. Much like filleting, you start cutting at the dorsal side, moving your knife down towards the spine and working against the ribs for maximum yield. Here, instead of turning the blade to cut the pin bones, you'll go to the outside of the fish and cut parallel with the spine on the near side of the pin bones, and you can lift the top loin away. Starting at the opposite side of the pin bones, you'll work your blade downwards toward the body cavity in the same manner to remove the bottom loin. After removing the skin from the loins, many people cut out the bloodline, a dark strip that runs close to the spine. You can leave the bloodline in with no adverse effects, but many find it strongly flavored and somewhat off-putting. With that step completed, you can portion the loins by cutting them perpendicularly across the "grain" of the meat, meaning the lengthwise direction of the muscle fibers, to your desired thickness.

To avoid confusion, we're not talking about the finny end part of a fish here. A tail cut is usually a muscular cross-section removed from the carcass, located behind the usable part of a loin or fillet and the tail fins. As the tail muscles get a lot of use, you can expect more flavor intensity from them than center-cut pieces. Tail cuts are typical from more round-bodied fish like tuna, swordfish, or jack. In some cases, the tail encompasses the entire usable part of the body meat, as is the situation with monkfish. Fishmongers typically cut monkfish into portions or medallions after removing the head, making it a bit of an outlier compared to other fishtails.

You can fillet the tail meat off the spine, but it's commonly used as a whole piece. Think of the tail cut as a beef or pork roast. You can slow-roast the tail section, which renders the fish's fat wonderfully, yielding juicier meat. You can also quick-sear it or use the tail in a stew. As a bone-in cut, it's easy to pick the meat from the bones since you're only dealing with the smaller vertebrae at the end of the spine.

Keeping with the whole-fish utilization, we come to the collar. Fish aren't wearing shirts, but the collar comes from the portion along the clavicle and the pectoral fin. They aren't as neat and tidy as a fillet, they have fat, skin, bones, and fins attached, but those factors all add up to delicious, often-ignored meat. The collars are left intact through the usual fillet methods and are often discarded along with the head and cheeks. They're generally cut from bigger fish to provide something more than the morsel a small fish would provide, and, like cheeks, there are only two per fish. So you may want to save them up for something bigger.

There are a few ways to remove the collars. The first is to remove the collars as part of the fillet process, cutting them from the fillet after the whole side gets removed. The second is to cut along the collar at the top of the fish, sawing through the inside gill plate with a serrated knife and then separating the last bit under the jaw with your fillet knife. It's not an elegant process or an elegant piece of fish; think of them as the equivalent of chicken wings, but the sophistication of its flavor makes up for its appearance. Collars stand up to grilling, searing, wok-frying, and sous vide cooking, although the latter benefits from a quick sear to crisp it.

There's still food to harvest after all of these techniques. You can separate the liver from the organs of larger fish removed before cutting the rest of the body. Sautéed cod liver is common in French cooking, and cod liver mousse is a Ukrainian staple. Salmon livers are equally tasty, and monkfish liver is known as sea foie gras in European cuisine and is a popular dish in Japan. If you've skinned your fish, their skins can be dehydrated and fried like pork rinds. Salmon skin rolls pair crisp skin with rice, fish, and vegetables before rolling it all in seaweed. Even without the cheeks and collars, the head is still useful for soups and stews, with many cuisines across the world having some variation of the two, from spicy broth-based stews from the Caribbean, South America, and Asia, to creamy, dill-infused soups from Scandinavian countries.

After removing the loins or fillets, the rib bones still have meat between them. You can scrape that meat off for sushi rolls, pasta fillings, or mousses. Slabs of whole smoked fish ribs are an option, or pick the meat from them after they've grilled. With all of this, we haven't even gone down the road of bladders, tongues, eyes, and the like. Finally, when you've run through the gamut of off-cuts, bone picking, and organs, what's left of the fish (hopefully just bones), simmered with some aromatic vegetables and herbs, yields a stock that's good for poaching, soups, or sauces.