a man I've happened to give a ride told me about a fish soup he ate at a native americans gathering containing fish scales. And the fish was Yellow Perch. I've heard that they cook unscaled fish cause it gives better taste, smell, nutrients or whatever but I'd guess this ought to be a fish with small scales so that they'd dissolve or at least soften when cooked. \n So I thought I should try to cook one and started with basic fish soup recipe - basically just fish itself plus and a bit of veggies and it didn't work - the scales were ugly and inedible so I had so sift the soup down with colander and pick all the scales out. And the soup taste was rather strange I must say. So have anybody of you heard anything about cooking Yellow Perch unscaled? you definitely have the sheer amount of respect to that fish and its scales if you write it with capital letter :) I once saw bunch fishies fried on a bonfire laid upside down over two branches, don't remember what they were, some kind of whitefish. Their scales got kinda melted and stuck to each other so you could take them like tacos shell and eat meat inside. so you may try to fry your perches a bit and then put into bouillon well, I tried that. Probably I had to wait longer to let the scales to form the shell, cause what I got was more like a clot of slime, totally inedible though smelled nice. why you can't simply fry it ?! perch scales are not that big how could you have picked them all out?! when I do fish soup I just push fish meat through colander keeping bones and scales out of it