How to clean the sea bream

To clean and fillet a 'round' fish like sea bream, you will need a fish fillet knife (with a very flexible and sharp blade), a pair of kitchen scissors, and a 'scaler', a tool useful for easily removing all the fish scales 1. If you do not have this tool, you can easily replace it with a kitchen knife.
Place the fish on a cutting board and start gutting it: with the scissors, make a cut on the belly and proceed straight up to under the head 2, then collect the innards with your hands and remove them 3.

Wash the fish belly well under running water to remove any remaining traces of blood 4. Now remove the fins: with the scissors, first cut the side fin located near the head 5, then cut the caudal fin located under the belly 6.

then the dorsal fin 7. Turn the fish to the opposite side and remove the other side fin 8 and the caudal fin 9.

With the appropriate scaling tool 10, or with the blade of a knife 11, carefully scale the sea bream by repeatedly passing the tool from the tail to the head (we recommend performing this operation under running water, or placing the fish in a bag, to prevent the scales from scattering everywhere). Rinse the sea bream under running water, washing it carefully on the outside as well. If you want to cook the fish whole, either in the oven or on the grill, the cleaning process ends here, and the sea bream is ready to be seasoned and cooked. If you need sea bream fillets instead, place the sea bream on the cutting board and remove the gills (located under the two semicircular openings on the sides of the head) by manually extracting them 12.

With the fish fillet knife, cut the head and remove it 13, then cut the tail and the dorsal part of the fish along the spine 14, starting from the top, and proceed by moving the blade horizontally to the work surface to obtain the first fillet 15.

Now separate the two halves of the fish 16. Proceed in the same way, detaching the flesh from the bone to get the second fillet (be careful not to remove too much flesh in the process) 17. Remove any remaining bones using tweezers 18 (help yourself by running a hand over the flesh to locate them), then remove the skin carefully with the knife, to avoid wasting the fish's flesh. Your sea bream fillets are ready to be cooked!