Today I want to show you how to clean and prepare a monkfish for cooking getting its maximum use since many times you can find one of these fish at a good price and it will be good for you to know the technique.
Cleaning a monkfish is a simple task and after the process, we obtain the clean and smooth slices of white meat, the monkfish liver, and its head and bones to make the best homemade fish broths since they contain a lot of gelatin.
Clean little hands and a sharp knife and we will have monkfish ready to cook in any of our recipes with this ingredient, enjoying its gastronomic quality with the satisfaction of having carried out the process ourselves.
How to clean and prepare monkfish for cooking
The first thing is separate head, that will be very useful for the preparation of homemade fish broths or fumet. To do this, we look for where the bone ends and cut decisively. Be careful with the teeth, they are quite sharp.
After separating the head, we proceed to remove the liver, which we can use to make a homemade fish pâté. With scissors, it is a very simple task that will not take us more than a few seconds.
Now we proceed to clean the fish. It is quite simple because the monkfish has a central boneless bone and a skin that is removed sliding it carefully towards the tail. It does not have any difficulty and we thus obtain a clean and skinless monkfish tail.
GOURMEO Kitchen Knife with Wooden Handle – Professional Sharp Stainless Steel Knife – Chef Knives for Carving and Cooking
Before cutting the tail of the monkfish, you must remove some bones, belonging to the dorsal area of the fish. It is very simple with kitchen scissors. We lift the thorns and cut them very easily and we can now proceed to chop the tail.
Depending on what you are going to prepare, you may prefer small delicacies or clean slices of monkfish boneless or you may prefer double cheeks of monkfish with the bone in the middle. Depending on the recipe you are going to prepare, one or the other cut will be better for you.
In the first case, we separate the two loins of the monkfish by separating them from the central bone. We also take advantage of the bonekeeping it with the head of the monkfish to make our homemade broths.
To make slices or delicaciesCut each loin into slices approximately two cm thick. Clean and smooth, they will be perfect for use in stews, legume or rice dishes, and also for frying in batter.
If what we want is monkfish cheeks with their bonethen we will not cut the central bone separating the loins, but crosswise, giving a small cut in the bone for each slice.
In which recipes can you use the monkfish once it is clean?
With the clean monkfish slices that we have obtained, we can make many recipes, as varied as those that we propose below, in stews, rice dishes, legumes and also in fried foods.
With all these recipes made with the monkfish slices, you can enjoy its smooth and white meat and with the head and bones prepare wonderful fish broths to enrich stews and rice dishes. Finally, with the liver of the monkfish you can make a seafood pâté.
In DAP | How to clean and cut a hake for use in the kitchen
In DAP | How to cut a whole sirloin for maximum use