Deboning northern pike a different way

Well, today we're going to bone a

northern

pike

and I wanted to show people a little bit

different

way of doing it because I have a little bit

different

method of boning the

pike

. Most guys when they bone the pike. Now I have a single steak with all the bone removed. I always find that when I'm at the filling table and the mosquitoes are killing me and everything else, I'm not really in the mood to bone it, so I just take the fillets off the pike and remove the ribs and then when I'm back at home or in front of the campfire and I have a drink or something to go, I can remove all the bones.

I bone the pike in a little. different method where I cut the chunks or cut the pike into small pieces that are ready to go in the pan or wherever you're maybe going to put them. Today I'm going to put some in a smoker brine and uh and As I say, it's an easier way to do it for me and I don't have to fight the elements. I can even debone it after freezing the fish. In this case, what I'm using today already froze once and I ran away. I'm going to take it out and put it in a ground smoker here today, so I've got my pike fillet here.

The ribs are removed and it's just a normal steak and around here I have to get some. of the skin here, I leave a little bit of that for transportation so you can tell what species of fish is good, so here's my nice pipe P fillet that most people would be okay with if you cut the tail off right there . There are no bones in this piece, my first piece is ready to go in the pan, boneless or in the smoker brine, whichever the case is, now it's a personal preference, depends on the size of your Pike, but in this case you want to reduce the stakes.

I'll probably cut this guy into about uh, I don't know, three stakes, probably so I'll cut it once twice, so here I go. I have three pike stakes and they all have bones, all three pieces have. the bone, so now the trick is to get the bone out quickly and then throw it in the pan, so if you look at this first steak I took here, there's a little ridge of white bones right on the other side, those are the tips of the bones Y and what you want to do is cut the outside of the Y bones a little bit down and then guide the knife out, what you're doing is guiding it along the Y bone, okay, and this is where I do it. things a little different.

I can feel the bone with my knife. I take it out and cut it. I don't worry about where the end of the bone is here. I cut past the end and through it, so what I got. here's a piece of piping that has no bones at all, so in the pan now with this piece here the bones, the Y bones are still here, you're basically going to the center of the steak, just go down about an eighth of an inch. You can feel the bones if they're there but you're going to go down, you're on the other side of the Y and then you turn your knife and you cut up and you just slide the knife along the bones of the Y, you can see them there, just cut the knife towards you and right along the underside of the bone And, you're going to cut all the way to the bones and there you have it and that piece is all bone, so what do we do?

What's left here is a completely deboned

northern

pike, ready to go into my smoker brine. Here now you can see that it's a varied thickness, so you might want to leave it that way and throw it in the pan, but it will probably cook at different speeds, usually. What I'm going to do is take the thin piece and cut it, that small thin piece can go in the pan and this thicker piece, uh, in this case, for what I have to put in the smoker, I'm going to cut it around there. and I'm fine with two pieces of boneless fish right there, so now we're going to do this with the second piece of the fillet and you can actually see very well, you can see in this here that little white line that is your and bones right there and let's go to cut on the outside of the Y bones, so we're going to cut on this side, so we're going to cut so that it's nice and straight and this is when you have short pieces like this.

It doesn't meanders and wanders everywhere. I'm doing this with a fairly stiff stuffing knife, but you can actually do it with a butcher knife. It's that easy to do, so it's not really specific to a knife and it doesn't. It takes a lot of talent, I really still feel the top of the bones Y along the top of the Bon W and we're going to cut the bone right there when I run my finger over there, I can actually test to see if there are bones, there's no bones there, I can, it's a quick test, you can feel every piece you work with, if there's a bone left, you'll know, so you can see here, there's the center line of your steak, all this side down here.

There's nothing complicated about this, so we've got a nice straight piece here, we're going to go right on the center line, we go down a little bit, we start my cut, we get under that one and, we branch the piece there, then we go back and you can actually see my knife sliding right along the bottom of the bones And and speaking of feeling the bone, if you feel this good, it feels like tons of bone there and here, I feel here with my thumb, nothing, no bones, there's no bones and there's no bones around there and again so this can go right into the pan and again I'm going to cut it a little bit differently for my own sake here for what I'm doing, but however you want to cut this, you can continue. go ahead and Cut it any old way to put the pan on, yeah, so my third piece.

I know this piece here came from the bottom of the fish, so it doesn't have bones. Okay, so let's go up here. to the top of our bones and, bring them up on the outside a little faster this time, make sure it's boneless underneath and here it goes in here. CH, under our bones and and directly through the bone, cut the bones there and we'll cut it. again one more time there and I don't need that and right here we'll cut it there and we're fine we all bone the jackfish and that's how it's done