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"Y" Bones


DonBo

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The biggest thing with northern pike is to clean clean clean the outside before you ever start cutting.

Thoroughly rinse and scrub them (I use a green scratchy pad) several times to remove all the slime.

Once I am done scrubbing I heavily salt the entire outside of the fish and leave it sit for a couple of minutes, this draws the rest of the slime out of their skin.

After that I thoroughly rinse them again.

Then I can start cleaning them.

There are many different ways to clean them.

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Pickle the strips with the bones in them and you won't waste any meat.

This is another good method

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And the 5 filet method

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This guy wastes alot of meat but you get the idea

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just google it

and you will pull up some videos on it very good ones

thats how i learned just this past summer

i kept it on my favorites and watched before i cleaned them the first 4-5 times

they are my new fish of choice now

very good eating and lots of meat

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thats the first time i saw it done like that

i think he does lose some meat

the 2 best i found on google were a lady from a canadian resort

and guy from up there to both were very good easy to undrestand

probably the first ones that came up were the mn pros(winnie guides) theirs are good to

i like the lady i think it was cuz she takes the skin off right away and then you get rid of that slime right away to

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I have done all they way merk has shown and the first is probally the easiest that I have found but I do it just a bit differnt hard to explain and I watch a guy to it the thrid way and it was slick but I just dont care to do it that way allthou it works well

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The idea of scrubbing them, salting them, etc. I think is a bit much. You can clean the fillets in fresh water just fine after you've removed the skin. The scrubbing and salting is taking it a bit too far I think.

The posted pictures are good but it is not necessary to completely remove the back straps as it shows. With a little practice and a sharp knife you can do it and still end up with one complete fillet.

I cut down at about a 45 degree angle on the top side of the Y bones as the author suggests but I stop short of cutting all the way through the fillet. Next, I lay my knife almost flat at the lateral line and cut to meet the first cut I made, feeling the bones with the tip of my knife as I go. In the end I pull out a triangular section with the Y bones but leave a full fillet on the counter.

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ya one of those videos i think its a women in canada

she makes a point of first taking the the 2 slabs off

and then the skin and then you are rid of the slim

you can rinse the fillets i spose if you want..i dont

then debone em

i agree Bob all the salt and so on

you can be done cleanin them by the time you do all that

they are great eatin i'm so glad i learned how to do it

thanks to the powers of the INTERNET lol

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ya kinda funny story bout catchin them

of course fishing for walleyes be fore i was into to keepin northerns i would catch em

last fall i was using huge suckers trolling for northerns and was catchin walleyes lol true !!!!!!!!

go figure

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I love eating northerns. That said they taste 100x better if the Y bones are removed. In fact I would rather eat a northern less the Y bones than a walleye. Had a nice chunky 4.5 lb northern that I caught yesterday for dinner last night. Best part is the fish sandwich I just had for breakfast!

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Interesting. With all the pike I've cleaned over the years, I just fillet, remove rib bones, take off the skin and then remove the Y bones. I never rinse anything until after I've got the Y bones out.

I've never had more than a tiny bit of slime on any of the meat, and that was transferred from the skin itself. It's always washed off very quickly in cold water under the faucet with just a little light rubbing from my hands, and the pike always tastes great. The more you rinse and harder you scrub, the more of the essence/juices you are washing away and the less flavor you have. Only exception I make to that is if there's a lot of blood on the meat, but since I always bleed out the fish I'm going to keep as soon as they hit the ice, my fillets never have blood impregnated in them.

If you find the slime gross when you are cleaning them, you can easily hold the whole uncleaned fish under cold water coming out of the tap and rub/scrub the slime off the fish with your hands before you take the knife to them. Warm water, on the other hand, will produced added thick slime that will take more work to wash off.

Fresh fried pike fingers are one of my all-time favorite things to eat. Those and lake trout are neck and neck in my world.

First I cut off the tail section and slice it lengthwise to get two pike fingers (there are no Y bones in the last few inches of tail meat. Then, with the rest of the fillet, I end up removing the whole strip with the Y bones in it, so I'm left with three long narrow strips. The bony strip gets cut into chunks and thrown into a freezer bag for later pickling (dissolves the Y bones). The other two strips get cut into pike fingers, breaded and fried up in extra virgin olive oil. We prefer a 50/50 mix of Fryin' Magic and Shore Lunch for fixing fish this way.

One of the things we like best about saving the bony chunks for pickling is that no meat from the fish is ever wasted.

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I have a question for you guys. Is there a minimum size that you would attempt to clean? The lake I fish is loaded with 18"-20" Northerns. Would these be too small for any of these cleaning methods? Has anybody had any luck cleaning smaller ones like this or does it just get too difficult? Thanks for your thoughts on it.

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With the little slimers you can always "score" the Y bones. What you do is lay the fillet skin side down with the length going east and west in front of you. Take your fillet knife and make a series of parallel north and south cuts into the fillet the entire length of the Y bone structure. I place my cuts probably 1/4 inch apart. You go just deep enough to feel the Y bone get cut, without going all the way through the fillet.

When you fry the fish, the cuts allow the hot oil to get at the bones and soften them to the point you barely notice them.

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