I was contacted recently to try the Kona Kampachi from Kona-Blue. The fish is sushi grade and known for high omega-3 levels and being free of detectable mercury. It’s served at Morimoto’s restaurant, so I felt confident it would be good.

I don’t cook often with fish and knew this was a good opportunity to break out of my comfort zone. And when presented with the choice of receiving fillets, a gutted/headed fish, or the whole fish … I somehow thought getting the whole fish would be neat. I underestimated the size of the fish :-) This little guy is sitting on my half-sheet pan which is 18″ long!

The box from FedEx was big and weight about 20lbs. As I lugged it to the kitchen, my fear and trepidation were growing. What had I gotten myself into? I opened the box and pulled out the ice packs to discover the kampachi wrapped in plastic. For a brief moment I thought, ‘oh, he’s not that big’. I grabbed its tail and lifted him up realizing that he was kinda hefty.

The fish was harvested the other day and shipped overnight to my house. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t any fishy smell. I’m really picky about food smells and despise ‘fishy’ smelling fish markets and the like. I tried hard to smell this fish and there was nothing, not a single bad smell. Very clean and fresh.

I placed the fish into the sink and rinsed with cold water. Then, I stood there and just looked at it. I took a deep breath and thought through the how-to guide on cleaning and filleting a fish. Granted, the illustrations showed a fish the size of your hand. I decided that as long as I took it slowly, nothing would go wrong. The secret (I think) is that to filet a fish you do not need to scale it, nor gut it.

One guide that I found online stated that if you were going to filet the fish, you didn’t need to scale it nor gut it. I opted for this approach fearing what would be inside this fish. I picked up my sharpest knife and started the incision near the tail along the backbone. My knife was stopped by the scales. Admittedly, I probably wasn’t pushing too hard for fear that I would somehow wake him up.

I pushed a bit harder to get the knife in, then slid the knife on one side of the backbone up to the head. I continued following this path, each time slicing further down the bones. Before I knew it, I had one filet. I flipped over the fish and repeated.

Next, I laid the filet skin side down and worked my knife between the skin and flesh. I slid my knife along the skin and the filet came right off. Although my fillets are not as beautiful as they could be, I was proud that I accomplished it.

My first impression of the fish is that the flesh is so fatty and tender. My fingers were oily from handling it and it felt buttery smooth. We did visit a local sushi restaurant the other night and ordered Kampachi in anticipation of my fish order arriving this week. The fish was creamy and buttery, so delicious.

I still need to pluck out the bones, but will save that for later tonight. It’s quite a bit of meat, so tonight we will have some sashimi and spicy kampachi roll. I’ve never made sushi at home, so this should be interesting. Tomorrow, I will like steam the remaining fish and serve with an asian/soy dipping sauce. I’ll post both of these once they happen.

 Link to this page

 Link to this page