Quote Originally Posted by purplelab View Post
The way I eliminate blood on the filleted meat when I'm cleaning crappie is you cut underneath the gills(throat area) until you find that artery and cut it. You'll know you cut it when the blood starts flowing out. Let them "drain" about 10 minutes. Then fillet as usual. You get no blood on the meat that's usually hard to wash off. I do this with any fish I keep.
I was just logging on to post about the same thing. I usually bleed them out the same way, after spiking them in the brain to kill them humanely.

Recently, the last couple times I went fishing I caught more fish than I had time to clean and eat. There's a local business that buys fish here, and I brought him my crappie, having heard that you can get a good price. It turns out he brings them to New York City, where they are sold whole. He asked me not to cut the gills anymore because they don't look as good whole that way.

So today when I fished, I didn't bleed them out. When I was done, I decided to keep them after all. When I cleaned them, the fillets were sure enough bloody! It definitely took more work to clean off the blood than it did to bleed them out as I caught them.

In the end they tasted just fine, but I'll definitely keep bleeding them out.