There are many great things to love about the northern pike, but one thing no angler is going to miss is dealing with the Y-bone when filleting a northern pike. The Y-bone is classically the bane of many anglers who love the taste of pike and the fight that comes with fishing for trophy northerns, but they hate dealing with the difficult Y-bone, which can create very bony back fillets if not handled properly. There are a few different methods for removing the Y-bone of a pike effectively however all of them revolve around a careful bit of carving on the back side of the fish. Properly creating pike fillets takes more care and specialized cutting instructions than the far majority of other fish.
One of the benefits of fishing with my dad when I was young is that he was an old hand at working around the Y-bone and so while many other teenage anglers my age complained about how bony pike fish is or how impossible it was to cut out the annoying Y-bone, I spent countless hours in the cleaning house watching my dad’s steady hands with a fillet knife and mimicked what I saw with my own hands. Walleye were definitely much easier to slice up with a fillet knife, but there was a strong pride to being able to do a northern pike right. Not the first time – I butchered the Y-bone up the first time. But by the end of two weeks fishing for pike in Canada, I might not have been the same level as my pa but I could fillet a northern with a nice sharp fillet knife and do a pretty above average job of taking that Y-bone out. And time only made me better.
The first step the way I was taught is to cut down along the backbone starting just below the gill and split open the fillet. Remove the lower rib cage as you normally would. Next, you must find the lateral line running through the center of the pike fillet. When you find this, use the tip of the fillet knife and very slowly and carefully on the center line. You may have to cut more than once, but better to go too light and repeat rather than cut too far through. You should be able to feel the bones, and you want to keep the knife under them.
Next you run your finger over the top of the fillet, feeling for bumps. If you’ve made the cuts right, you should be able to feel them and cut the meat from the side of the northern pike’s backbone. Take the fillet knife and slice along the top side of the fillet to remove the fish from the bones you could feel with your fingers. Cut from bottom to top for the most efficient cut. The very thin strip which was between the two cut fillets will have very little meat, and the Y-Bone. So toss it with the skin, scales, and organs and you’re set with a simple way to remove the pike’s y-bone from the back fillet.
Here is also a good YouTube video which shows another process: