I finally caught some fish this morning. My wife thinks its kind of funny to see me go out at the crack of dawn with my fishing gear and not catch anything. But at least I showed her! I caught 2 fish which were just barely the legal size!
But they were catfish…and catfish have no scales. They have slippery, slimy skins.
I have caught catfish before in the past…and I’ve never been good at filleting them. How do you skin these suckers properly? For the size of the fish, the meat left aft trying to skin them doesn’t seem worth the effort. (Especially since on them made me have to cut my line!)
(an aside: I’m going to have work on catching something other than catfish…they ain’t a lot of fun if you’re not good af cutting them up)
It’s not a difficult task. Make an incision right behind the pectoral fins, and then grab the fish by the lower jaw (or some people nail them, through the head, to a post), grab the flap of skin with pliers and pull down. The skin stays pretty much intact.
I caught a lot of catfish in my youth, and we always used a pair of ordinary pliers to skin them. Then again, that was forty years or so ago and catfish-skinning technology may well have inproved over that interval.
You might try moving your bobber closer to your hook in order for the hook to be further from the bottom, where the catfish tend to dwell if you’re lake fishing.
There aren’t many other freshwater fish that are better eating though so you have to pick your battles. All fish require some effort to skin and/or fillet so you might as well learn the technique for the best ones.
Put your fingers in its gill slits, hold on tight, grab one of the spines/fins with pliers, twist it away form the body, and pull it with the skin away from the head. Do this with each spine/fin until it is skinned. If you want to make catfish stew, you do not want to nail the head to a tree. The head is the best part for making stew and if you put a nail in it, you will ruin it. As you get experience skinning the body part of the fish, you’ll figure out the best way to skin the head.
The skinning methods you see on the links are kind of archaic. Those methods are used when one wants to cook their fish with the skeleton intact.
We fillet our fish. that is to cut the sides(fillet’s) from the backbone then one could at that time remove the rib bones or remove the skin just like one would remove skin from any fish. Start at the tail and slice the meat, (more like scraping the meat from the skin.
Now I will agree the skin on many scaled fish is very tasty (of course this only is only when the scales are removed). Its just such a mess cleaning up the area around the scaling table:D.
