Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire THE best way to filet a northern

Improved method for cleaning a northern pike.

Still don't see why he didn't just fillet it.

Lol, sure seems like it takes a lot of time with admitted waste. Seen that way, but I'll stick to the traditional fillet method and cutting out the Y bones. I will admit I use an electric fillet knife, do not really traditional but you get it

Was at a party a couple of nights ago and fileting northern came up in the conversation. I usually threw them back but am going to start keeping them. Thanks for posting that video. Dave

What a clown! There are so many different "methods" to cut a fish that is for all intents and purposes the same as any other. Just take the fillets off like any other and cut along to y bones and take them out as a unit. It takes far less time than this joke and the fillets are intact...

This works great on pike about 2x the size of what he had there

It doesn't take that long, has been around a long time.

Eileen and I were first shown the technique by Scott Sundheim, then a guide on Fort Peck Reservoir, in the 1990s. She was writing a book on freshwater fish cooking, and needed some northerns. Scott used the technique, and also at that time Eileen was the game/fish cooking columnist for Field & Stream. She wrote it up--and a year later at the end of day a client of Scott's asked him to fillet the pike he'd caught "this way," handing Scott the page torn from that issue of F&S.

The guy acted like it might be kinda tricky--until Scott pointed out his name in the article.

We haven't filleted a northern pike the "old-fashioned way" since....

Thanks for your positive note. For the tards, I'd like to reiterate that this method produces a boneless filet that will be appreciated by children and those that do not like fish/northern/bones. This was also a very small pike, so the intent was to show how to "maximize" the filet without much wasted meat. You can't cut the y-bones out of a tiny pike without butchering the whole dang thing. The five filet method can lead to a lot of loss if you are not very precise.

5 fillet method works great.

I always have a wooden "priest" of some sort to whack a fish before I start to clean it.

I read the title and immediately thought it was how to filet a Northern Cardinal and I wanted to see that. 😀

So are you asking me to kidnap a priest or am I reading this incorrectly?

We were camping at a roadside park in Canada. My buddy caught a northern pike about 3 feet long. We didn't know what it was, we don't have pike in south Georgia.

A Canadian guy was fishing there with his son. He said "That's a snake. Garbage fish, we don't eat those."

It looked OK to us, we gutted it and cut it into 1 inch thick steaks, and fried 'em up in the skillet over the campfire. "Snake" tasted pretty good to the Georgia boys.

I thought about pressure canning some pike. Do you think the Y bones would disintegrate like other fish bones do?

Bclark,

They do.

Growing up we canned a lot of smoked pike. Though I do not personally remember unsmoked and canned pike, my mother always said it was too soft and needed to lose some water before canning.

It is very good pickled, too.

Cut the thing up into 2 inch squares and use it for catfish bait. Then eat the catfish. Problem solved!

I fillet Pike using the 5 fillet method, and then I take the parts containing the Y bones and I pickle those. The vinegar dissolves the Y bones and you waste nothing.