Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi all,

Well, we have begun culling trout, a couple of fish a week now, most around the 400g mark.

Still have 25 or so to go.

As it is my first harvest, i would like to check that i am in fact 'doing' it right.

Ok, so my chosen method is as follows:

hold victim upright on the board,
five good whacks across the eyes with the butt of my heavy kitchen knife,
blade between the gills and cut down and the jobs done.

then

cut up the belly from the fishes butt up to the gills,
thumb inside and push up towards the gills pushing all the insides out,
remove the head including the gill fins and insides.

then

de-fin the rest of the fins, (leaving the tail to hang onto),
scale it,
clean the slippery off it,

then into the fridge.

Did i miss something?
Any objections or corrections?

Thanks guys,

Have a great new year all!

Regards

2 fingers in the gills, thumb in back of neck and snap back head to break spine. Gut and gill, leave the head and rest on and dont bother scaling. Job done.

G'Day Charlie,

oh yea, ok, i saw i guy do that on the tube, breaking their necks. ok,

Can you explain 'gill' - ing them for me please mate?

Cheers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pk55FsVidE

oh wait, i just found this,

Explains it pretty well,

Sorry should have looked first

How rude of me, I should have said gday first Porter! How have you been? Good to see you harvesting those trout. I like your filter bins you have made too

Yea, gilling is just removing the gills. Gut and gill is a common fishing term, well it is amoungst my mates anyways. You can pretty much just pinch them out on small fish like trout and perch. Faye has mentioned somewhere before that they have deep fried entire fish in the deep fryer and they tasted great, I mean guts, scales the lot. Havnt tried it myself yet but its on my to do list.

Have you tried brine and smoked yet? There are some good threads somewhere..

G'day, Porter. The only thing in common between your method and my method is that we both make a cut from the cloaca to the gills in order to gut the fish.

I don't whack it with the handle of a knife, I stab it in the brain with a sharp, short-handled screwdriver.
I leave on the head, all fins and the tail, the scales and the ('slippery') slime. When my processed Rainbow Trout go into the fridge or freezer in their vacuum sealed bags, they are pretty much as they were when swimming around a short while before except they no longer have guts or gills, and have very little blood left in them.

Personally, I reckon you may be working them over too much.

Is the reason you don't scale trout because you don't eat the trout skin? Is it not possible to cook trout with crispy skin? (I do love love crispy skin when I cook salmon)


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They barely have scales worth trying.

The skin is good though when eating skin I usually scale. There are nearly as many ways to clean and prepare a trout as there are anglers, but a quick tour through YouTube land will cover the most popular. I'm partial to gutting, slice each side behind the gill plate, and then excise from each side of dorsal spine down out along outside the ribs. Leave a bit of tail skin attached and use it to skin off the resulting fillet.

All good Charlie! No mate i haven't tried that brine or smoked yet, just in the oven. But i have seen the threads for it, definitely will look at that more.

Yeah, the new filters are working a treat, I know filtration and AP are still a sore point for alot of folks, and we have been stuffing around with it for a while, but as we only run quite small grow beds and made the mistake of using 1/4minus as media in the beginning, we are finding that the beds are processing the waste alot better.

And we are getting much better growth than last year for it.
These photos were taken on 23/9/13 and 27/12/13. We haven't had growth like that before so it seems to be working for us alot better.


Hi PLJ, thanks mate, it does seem that way, so that's me leaving the scales and fins and tails on (Heads on freak the kids out) to cook. No problems at all,

Hey BrewCat, thanks mate, struggle with animal skins, i dont do chook skin, its the whole feathers thing, and i found out it carries over to fish skin, the whole scales thing! Yeah there was so much on the tube, some really not good, some brilliant, it comes in handy sometimes!

Regards