How To Clean Crappie Fish
The easiest and fastest way to clean Crappie is to simply fillet the fish without the skin. By cleaning the fish in this manner you neither have to scale the fish or gut it when cleaning. Just follow these few simple steps.
What You Need
- Fillet knife (freshly sharpened)
- Cutting Board
- Fresh water to rinse the fish off after cleaning
Step 1
Lay Crappie on the cutting board. Hold the Crappie securely by the head and place your fillet knife directly behind the gill cover and the pectoral fin. ( The fin that is on the side of the fish)
Step 2
Slide the knife down until you can feel the backbone with the knife. Avoid cutting into the backbone.
Step 3
Without removing the knife from the vertical cut you just made turn the knife horizontally towards the Crappie’s tail. Using the backbone to guide your knife cut between the top and bottom fins. Stop cutting just above your tail. Leave the fillet attached to the fish’s body by just the skin.
Step 4
Using the attached piece of skin as a hinge, flip the cut fillet so that the skin side is down and the flesh side is facing up. Gently slide the knife between the skin and the flesh of the fish. Run the knife down the entire length of the fillet until the fillet is separated from the skin.
Step 5
Now that the fillet is free from the rest of the fish lay the fillet flat on the cutting board. Carefully slide the knife between the ribs and the flesh of the fish and cut the ribs loose. Discard the ribs.
Step 6
To get the second filet, turn the fish around, and repeat the process.
If You Want To Keep The Skin On The Fish
If you want to keep the skin on the fish so that you can enjoy the crispy skin when you pan fry the fish then you need to scale the fish prior to filleting it.
Using a different knife than the one you plan to fillet your fish with start at the tail of the fish and scrape the knife upwards in order to remove the scales.
The scales should just pop off as you scrape. Once you have finished scaling the fish rinse the fish off and lightly run your hand over the skin to ensure that you have removed all the scales.
Once you are sure that you have removed all the scales proceed with filleting the fish.
If you don’t mind having the ribs bones attached to your fillet, you can skip the step to remove these bones as well as leaving the skin on the fish and descaling the fish.
Cleaning a Crappie is pretty much like cleaning and filleting any type of pan fish, all it takes is a little practice and eventually, you will find scaling the fish gets faster with practice. In addition, you’ll also find that after cleaning a few of these fish you leave more and more flesh on your fillet.
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