Many fishing vessels have on-board equipment to freeze their catch at sea. Most of these simply remove the guts and take the head off the skeleton before freezing, so the end-product is known as H&G (headless and gutted). This is simpler and less expensive than having additional machinery and crew to further process by taking the fillets off the carcase, and only then freezing it on-board.

H&G is a very useful product for further processing and in recent years a considerable tonnage has been shipped in frozen form to China where it is partially defrosted, then filleted and re-frozen. The end product has an excellent physical appearance because each fillet is handled individually, but the very process of double-freezing means that the ultimate flesh quality cannot be as good as sea-frozen fillets.

If you would like to understand the full complexity of sea-frozen fillets, please look at the excellent short video on our home page taken recently aboard the Granit lV

Fillet and freeze at sea