Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

hehehe

Just pulling them out and leaving them is pretty inhumane. I am not a fish eater (allergy) so the boss is doing all the trout for school tomorrow in readiness for Wednesday's cookup. He is a keen fisherman and reckons the easiest and most humane way to do it on mass is to dump them straight into an ice bath. That way they are already dead when you have to try and hold them to gill and gut.

As you well know trout have a need for high levels of dissolved oxygen and they die very, very quickly without it. That is why they are dead before they get to the kitchen, not because they are left to die.
Ice for trout is not necessarily a quick death like it would be for barramundi.
A really quick way is to pierce their brain with a sharp object like a cake skewer, however all fish have a sightly different anatomy and therefroe their brain may be in a slightly different place. Just have to find it

So an ice bath won't work for trout? I guess that saves me buying a heap of ice before my visit tomorrow

Hey there, I think the iki jimi method is the most widely used.
Click this link
http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/004/X2590E/x2 ... #TopOfPage
Mmm. maybe cut and paste it to your browser as I dont have time to work out the link.
Cheers
Doofa

Thanks guys. It appears that the saying that "there's more than one way to skin a cat" also applies for "there's more than one way to kill a fish"...

I doubt that I am confident enough to do the "covert action commando style" neck breaking on a fish at the moment... Might leave it for next time...

I like "hit it on the head" one. Quite simple...

The "iki jimi" method looks good as well... Although stabbing the right spot is probably important for a quick kill...

After the above, it is still important to cut the gills and let it bleed??? Or bleeding is not necessary for trouts??

Will probably try the tea towel as a means of holding the fish stable...

A stupid question.... Where is the throat??

Also now that I have a couple of ways to kill the trout... will probably try a few ways....

How do you clean the dead fish?? From basic, please... Again, I have never kill a fish intentionally before...

This is pretty much the way I do it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZh6IMPvR_o

The "neck" is in between the two gill covers i believe.

Thanks goola... nothing better than a video showing how it is done...

That doesn't seem to "bleed" the fish at all though. Is this step really important?

The japanese use a method called ike jime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ike_jime.

It took me some time to get it right but this is now the method I use when fishing as it is very quick (when done correctly) and prevents excess stress hormones being released into the tissues and effecting taste.

If you find the thought of killing fish this way distasteful, and you're not keen on breaking their neck as others have suggested (the method I used to use before learning ike jime), then just cut their head off. Clean and quick.

Antisense ^_^

Ike for me.

Very ....if you don't bleed a fish ASAP, it will bleed into the flesh....so fish like cod and tuna, have to be bleed staight away, other wise their flesh is tainted and sometime's ruined

Yep... especially "soft" flesh fish... ie Salmon, Tailor, Trout, Tuna etc...

I sell a few fish to fish mongers and they all insist that the fish are killed by ike jime. Supposedly when killed this way the blood from the flesh goes into the gut cavity and dosent spoil the flesh, therefore the fish dont require bleeding.