Day eighty one

Salmon for today

What are the challenges to fillet and to skin salmon? Is it easy fish?

Moving forward in the fish fabrication. Today we handled tuna. At he beginning of the class we were shown how to fillet a halibut and how to portion these fillets. After that there was demo on a salmon, how to remove a spinal bone, how to skin fillets, how to portion them.

Salmon is quite a big fish. Fortunately it has soft bones. By soft we mean that they are a little bit easy to handle (to cut through) and as a result of this softness method 'up and over' does not work. You will cut through the bones and at the end you will have a fillet with irregular bones which you will have to remove anyway. Therefore we use 'straight' method - we cut through the rib bones holding a knife against the spinal bones using it as a guideline. After that we remove the rib cage bones, trim all fins and skin fillet if required.

Just in case I did not explain the method 'up and over'.... In this method
we start filleting fish from the dorsal area (spine top). We cut the skin using the tip of a knife and slowly and carefully separating the bones and the flesh using only the tip of the knife. When we reach the spinal bone, we flip the fillet and continue to work removing the flesh from the rib cage and the tail part until we got the full side fillet. This method as well as straight one works for round fish, they do not work for flat fish (halibut, sole, and others).

Look at this unhappy face! It's halibut.

Salmon, as to compare with sole family, is slightly difficult. This is not because the fish is bigger. The salmon skin is softer and it easily can be cut or torn when you try to remove it. Also there are a cartilage line in the center of the inside side of the fillet, which should be removed as well and the dark meat under the skin outside, which is better to remove as well. Imagine, that a salmon is softer and has much more fat inside and the picture is complete, you handle delicate fish with high fat content and it simply slips from you. You can not apply pressure, because you may damage the flesh. OK, it was not SO bad, just a few challenges:-)

Also we had the introduction to management today and there was a quiz. This time it was better than the fist quiz, probably topics were more familiar to me. However one question was not worded correctly and almost everyone got a wrong understanding, so we might get an extra credit for this question.

As a part of project for management, our small group did interview with the Dean of our Campus. It was a great interview about motivation. The key point I got from him is that it is difficult to motivate person to do anything. All motivators work for short period of time. But you can inspire a person to do something. This is a good idea to me...