1,534 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

Remove bones from fish

Let's talk about fish: It's not a scoop, it's much more pleasant to eat fish from which all the bones have been carefully removed, even if it's a rather painful and time-consuming job, the result is worthy of your efforts.

Here are some important points to keep in mind.

14 K 5/5 (14 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Fish Bones Claw Flesh Fillet Fish steak

Last modified on: October 16^th 2021

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Remove bones from fish

the tool

No secret, you absolutely need a pair of fishbone pliers, it's really the essential tool with enough strength to be able to catch and remove a fishbone, usually very well hung.
You can use a pair of universal or fine-nosed tweezers, but it's not very practical (don't even think about recycling an old pair of tweezers, you won't get anywhere).
If you have to buy one, go for a stainless steel one, like the one on the picture above.

Finding the fish bones

This is not so easy, as they are usually almost invisible.
The best way is to put the fillet or the fish in front of you (on a plate if possible) and to pass your finger along the flesh, if the bones are not visible, on the other hand they can be felt.

Removing them

That's the trick, it's not obvious but there is a kind of "direction", fish bones are generally oriented from the head to the tail, from the central bone and slightly curved, schematically, like this:

arêtes de poisson

Add to this that there is a tip and a point, the tip being significantly larger than the point.
If you magnify it a lot, a fish bone looks like this:

arête zoom

When you have a fillet in front of you, it's the inside of the fish that you see, the fishmonger has cut the flesh along the central bone, and then all the other bones are cut off as well.
So they are in the flesh like this:

arêtes dans la chair

To remove them without too much difficulty, you have to go in the right direction with the pliers, grabbing the big end, and pull in the opposite direction.

arêtes sens de retrait

In other words, in the direction indicated by the green arrow, but especially not in the direction of the red arrows.
Well, it wouldn't be dramatic either, but 1) it will be harder and 2) you might tear off some flesh with the edge, which would be a shame.

So you have to do that for all the bones, until you run your finger over them and you don't feel any point, then move on to the next fillet.
Yes, yes, it's long and painful, but what a pleasure afterwards at the table...

To sum up: To remove the bones from a fillet or a fish steak, you need a good pair of bone grippers, and pull them in the opposite direction of their location.

Lasts posts

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 2025541

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20252,1025

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,1563

The grease spray

As soon as you have something in a recipe that sticks to the mold, the question always arises as to how difficult it is to remove from the mold. There's nothing more frustrating than breaking your cake when unmolding it, because part of it has stuck in the mold. The classic way to avoid this is...
August 26^th 20256,6705

Cake moulds

When we make a cake, or a cake of the same rectangular shape, we usually take out our usual mould and tell ourselves that the recipe is anyway "for a cake", but is it really that simple?
August 25^th 20256,7135

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201882 K 24.3

How to avoid lumps

You've probably come across this unpleasant phenomenon where, when you try to incorporate an ingredient (usually a solid or powder) into a preparation (usually a liquid), the mixture doesn't mix properly and you end up with little "balls" or little lumps of the solid part that refuse to mix with the...
October 9^th 202022 K4.8

Tranché, dissociated, failed, in short... missed!

When preparing a sauce or a cream, there's always a (small) risk that the creamy preparation you're working on will suddenly separate into two parts of different textures: a liquid part, for example, and a more or less solid part, or even become lumpy. It's terribly frustrating, but we'll see...
June 19^th 202312 K5

Drawing a pattern in pastry

Often in the kitchen, in pastry-making, or in baking, we need to trace a pattern on a pastry. It's just a question of aesthetics but it has its effect after baking on a galette, pithiviers, pâté en croute (terrine in a pie crust), etc.
May 23^th 201934 K4.1

Kitchen ovens

You certainly have one in your kitchen, an oven, the essential tool for all kinds of cooking, whether in the kitchen of course, but also in pastry, bakery, pizza, and many others. Here is some information on its structure and operation.
May 16^th 202033 K4.4