today I'm gonna try to show you how to butterfly fillet this walleye here nice quality walleye the first step if you're gonna play something skin on is to scale it to scale it you take a scaler and you start working it against the grain of the scales so I'm gonna start swiping it that way wouldn't work force alright this side is pretty much done you flip it over make sure you get the belly this whole belly it's gonna be part of the play you're gonna get all the belly meat basically gonna cut the Flay up so it's all one giant filet in the end one other trick you can do if you don't have a scaler is to take a serrated steak knife and scale it it works pretty well I already got basically all the scales off here but you can see the ones that I didn't get or coming off even better with the steak knife you know it'll take some some of that slime off to make sure I got the top good here I don't think it's quick dug in enough on the top here just missed some along the top alright I think that's pretty good we'll check this yeah it's always harder to get the scales off like right near the fins here it takes a few passes buck you keep keep scraping it they'll come off alright that's a pretty good job there she's pretty much scaled now now I'm gonna flare the butterfly style first thing I do is I try to clamp her in she's a little big she's over six pounds so she's a decent while I get my fillet knife out get rid of these scalars that's all done now I can flavor with the skin on first thing I do is I make an incision just like a normal fillet pretty much I have another video where I Flay a walleye and I'm gonna do the same thing for a little bit here pretty much the same method and and eventually I'm gonna start doing something a little different but I make an incision right behind the gill plate here angled at about a 45 degree back towards the head then I take the knife and I run it along the backbone here I'm sticking nice and about 3/4 of an inch on this walleye so I don't stick it in too far maybe an inch I just run it along the backbone here normally I would push the knife all the way through here but I want to keep this skin attached down here for the butterfly fillet so I'm gonna just continue to run it shallow here and then I'm gonna cut the the piece right by the tail down a little bit normally I keep that on to take the skin off but we're not taking the skin off so I just leave it like that okay next step is I flip the walleye like this and then I start peeling back the meat here I'm trying to do a nice job because I'm taking this fish to a dinner party so I want to look nice that's why I'm doing it butterfly style you just peel back the meat and cut straight down until you meet resistance that resistance is where the ribs start right on right along the lateral line here so you're gonna cut down basically to here and once the ribs start you're gonna have a roll pin bones that stick into the meat you're gonna start to angle your knife up just like that ever so slightly and cut around the ribs while cutting through the pin bones so it's a little bit tricky and takes some practice but once you do some you'll get the hang of it yeah I just bake swipes you can hear the pin bones being cut there but you don't want to cut through the ribs this while I spent in the fridge for a little bit she's still fresh but it means tearing just just a tiny bit that'll happen if you store him in the fridge for a little bit before you cut him up oops didn't go quite deep enough there we go and you want to just take it along the ribs down the side of the down the side of the fish here until you meet the end of the ribs but you don't want to you don't want to cut through the bottom of this way here you're gonna leave that part hole I'm just gonna take it all the way down so now we have a nice solid fillet and it's still attached to the other Flay on the other side by this belly meat here now we're gonna flip it we're gonna do the same exact thing all over again first thing we do is we make an incision right behind the gill plate at about a 45 degree angle going back right behind these fins here I started on the wrong side and then we're gonna take your cutter down like this and then flip her back over here she's a big fatty a little bit hard to handle but it's easier if you clip them in she's just a little too big to clip in though then you can pull against the fish see I'm just gonna make shallow swipes kind of hard filming this at the same time to point my head in an awkward way let's make shallow swipes until you hit lateral line area right here once you hit that that lateral line you're gonna hit the ribs and you're gonna instead of going straight now and you're gonna want to curve up and go over but you're also going to cut through the pin bones at the same time you can hear the knife cutting through those pin bones but it's not cutting through the ribs you want to start aiming your knife back down after you go over the hump of the ribs so you can catch that shallow upper belly meat see how thin it is there don't want to lose that especially on a butterfly filet you just take it down my knifes a little bit dull too shouldn't sharpen it before I did this but just take this fillet down now comes the tricky part connecting both fillets so first thing you want to do is connect them there by cutting through right across these these front pins like I just did then you want to pull it down a little bit it's gonna get stuck this is the unfortunate part it's gonna get stuck right around this this anal fin here so what I like to do is just take the knife and cut around a little circle around anal fin like this if I could get it the so called out my hands are called too there we go so I basically just cut all the way around this this anal fin here and now it should come off a little bit easier it's gonna be attached to the guts a little bit and if you didn't cut the meat all the way down it won't it will still be attached by the meat but you just want to go like this cut that just that little tag on the meat off like that and we're pretty much done we just cut her off here through the skin I didn't quite cut the skin all the way down there we go beautiful butterfly filet I'm gonna take the cheeks off in a moment here but I'm not quite done with this carcass but I want to show you the butterfly filet first see it's a nice size of bull filet all in one piece pretty much I got to wash off all the loose scales but she's scaled to that's how you do a one-piece filet we're both side they're connected by the belly meat I'll do a little bonus for you guys I'll take the cheeks off right here take the cheeks off you stick the knife in at about a 45 degree angle I go I start right here pretty much right right by the back end of the jaw you want to stick the knife in it into the middle the cheeks are kind of shaped like a diamond going into the face and you want to just run your knife around in a circle all the way around here back to the eyeball and then you want to flip your cheek up I would do this slowly here for you flick your flip your cheek up just by peeling it pinch it right where it is at the eyeball here you'll hear a little snap from like a tendon or or something ripping a very small one and then you want to just take it with your fingers and peel it off the skin like that and there's a cheek so we got one little stake there flip her over to the other side we'll do the other cheek usually start right here kind of doing it backwards this time that's a little awkward but just make a circle like a 40 degree angle or so and you want to rip the cheek up once while you might need to cut something but I'll rip the cheek up pinch it or cut it and then you want to just peel her off here there's another nice solid cheek and that's it she's all done beautiful butterfly fillet might want to trim this just a little bit of this membrane off here that's that's good there she is butterfly fillet and two cheeks