Pike Y Bone Removal Made Easy
If you’re looking for a simple pike Y bone removal process, you’ve come to the right place!
When it comes to keeping some of the catch for a meal, many fishermen shy away from eating pike, which in our opinion are among the finest fish to eat. The key to well-prepared pike, however, is boneless pike. There are a few tools that make the process a breeze.
We recently got back from a trip up to Ontario’s massive Lake Nipigon, which is prime shore lunch country. Here’s a quick tip we documented from our trip. Hopefully you can put it to use to make your pike Y bone removal process a little bit less daunting:
1. First things first, begin by slicing off the tail piece of the pike. That’s always a “choice” fillet because it doesn’t have an Y bones, not that it matters because we’re going to remove all the bones anyway!
2. Next up, you’ll notice a nice lateral line, a break point between the two halves of the fillet. Take your fillet knife and run it down that line. It almost pulls apart naturally with your fingers, but it cuts very easily as it’s already a cleavage plane in the fillet. Make this cut on the belly-side of the fillet, leaving the bones on the top half.
3. Take what’s left over and identify the string of bones going across the length of the fillet. Take your knife and make another cut along the other side of the Y bones that haven’t yet been removed from the meat. You should be able to hear and feel the Y bones rubbing against the side of the knife.
4. At this point in the pike Y bone removal process, you should be left with some tail meat, belly meat, and back meat, but don’t toss those bones away just yet! There’s still a strip of meat to extract across the backside of those Y bones you just chopped out. Flip the fillet over and run your blade horizontally across the Y bones, and that will give you your last good piece of meat.
Watching the video above will give you the best illustration of how to make all the proper incisions for the perfect pike Y bone removal outcome!
All that’s leftover at the end is a strip of Y bones. There’s not a lot of wasted meat at the end of this process and you’re left with a delicious northern pike that’s ready for the frying pan!
