I'm really **** at filleting, How many just gut and then bake/smoke/grill their fish to eat off the bone?
Surely this is easier than filleting

filleting is not that difficult you just need a really sharp knife and practice.

Therea re really no great secrets regarding filleting trout apart from a flexible knife blade 6 to 9 inches long, regularly sharpened and kept sharp. One of the tricks are to take the blade along the bones between the flesh and bones using very light pressure. However, you must feel the bones all the way along separating the flesh from the bones.

I never filet my trout, I either bake them whole or split them down the middle, cover lightly with Brown sugar, salt and a little bit of dill and pop it in my hot smoker for 15 to 20 minutes. Nothing wrong with filleted trout but if you cook or smoke them there is no waste at all, Every last flake can be picked of the bones!
Serve the trout hot with a cold pint and some very fresh thickly buttered bread and you have the best meal money cant buy! (at least here in NZ, where it is illegal to buy or sell trout).
All the best.
Mike

I'll gut and de-head my fish then fillet them. I just slice all the way down alongside the backbone cutting through the ribs. When I'm preparing thefillets for eating I pick out the ribs and the tiny "eye" bones which you can feel for with your thumb and then skin the fillet. This gives a super skinless, boneless fillet perfect for cooking in a number of ways. You can even turn them into fish fingers for the kids.

That sounds delicious, I have just bought a smoker so will give that a go

I tried a number of methods for filleting trout, having read somewhere that the usual method of cutting just behind the gill plate and running the knife along the backbone as you do with sea fish doesn't work too well for trout. Having made a complete hash of several other methods I tried the old faithful and it works fine. Sharp knife as others say is essential, I use a pair of eyebrow tweezers to remove the pin bones before cooking too, takes a few minutes and you end up with completely boneless fillets.

My method is exactly the same as BobP's. Life is too short to spend any more of it picking bones out of trout fillets on the plate.

May just be worth saying that most of the fish Bob and I catch will typically be from reservoirs and small commercial stillwaters, so at least 1lb 8oz in size 'cos that's the size they are stocked. I believe that significantly smaller fish, for example little wildies - if there are enough in the water to stand modest cropping of course - may be treated like herrings, ie cook them whole and then slip the backbone and ribs out in one go.

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JH based near Southampton

What is the old faithful?

Cutting down behind the gill plate and then along the backbone cutting through the ribs as per sea fish and as in my first sentence, sorry that could have been clearer.