Steps in the fishskin tanning process

First Steps: prepwork for tanning

Skinning

• Work with a fresh + cold fish fillet

• Can start with a knife but mainly use a blunt tool (spoon, mussel shell) - or your hands

• Hold your tool 90 degrees to the skin and scrape forward from tail to head until all meat is removed from the skin

• Separate skin from meat + immediately cool the skin by placing it in a jar of salty cold water for 1-2 minutes

If we skin a fish that has been degraded (sat around too long), the meat will be mushy + challenging to separate cleanly. Easy fix: this will require more fleshing.

Fleshing

• After cooling the skin, place it scale-side-down on a cutting board

• Remove any meat (flesh) that remained on the skin, by scraping in a forward motion, holding a blunt tool 90 degrees to the skin

• Try to remove the fuzzy grey material with the meat, but if it doesn’t budge, skip it until you membrane

De-scaling

• After fleshing, flip the skin over so it is membrane-side-down on your cutting board

• Remove the scales by gently scraping in a forward motion (tail to head), holding a blunt tool 90 degrees to the skin

• Try to keep the scale pockets intact

• Focus attention on the ridgeline of large fishes

• Any stubborn scales can be skipped or else taken out with tweezers

Membraning

• After de-scaling, flip the fishskin over so it is again scale-side-down on your cutting board

• Remove the membrane by one of two ways (or both!):

• firmly scraping in a forward motion (tail to head), holding a blunt tool 90 or 45 degrees to the skin

• (larger fish) cutting a peice of membrane off near the tail and removing it in one piece with your hands

• Get all the fuzzy gray material off now

{pause point} You can leave a scraped fishskin in cold water with 25% salt in the fridge for several days

Fat-liquoring

• After membraning, wash the fishskin with a natural soap in cool to lukewarm water. This will both clean + alkalize it.

• Pat the skin dry with a towel

• Place the skin in a fat emulsion:

• 100 ml liquid vegetable oil

• 1 egg yolk (save the white for later)

• 1 tsp natural liquid soap

• Leave in a fat emulsion for 10 minutes

{pause point} You can roll up a fat-liquored fishskin and place it in a plastic bag in the fridge overnight (12 hours max)

Hang to dry

• After fat-liquoring, wring the excess oil off the fishskin with your hands

• Hang the skin somewhere airy + warm, ideally in the sun

• Over the next several hours, stretch the skin periodically; say every ten to twenty minutes.

The goal of the last step is to ensure the skin doesn’t dry into crisp rawhide with compressed protein fibres. This is not a true softening but a preparatory step to ensure the fibre network stays open + receptive - necessary for oxidation over the next week.