Salt and Pepper Squid

While this recipe is a keeper, the most time-consuming task of the recipe is cleaning the squid if you are using fresh squid. I don't know of any seafood counter at an Asian grocery store that cleans squid before packaging it for sale. This is the third recipe attempt from a collection of Fuchsia Dunlop cookbooks. This recipe comes from her book Every Grain of Rice, which won this year's James Beard award for international cookbooks. The photo of my dish doesn't even look remotely close to the pretty squid shapes in the photo of her book. It was tasty regardless.

Salt and Pepper Squid

This is a dish that you could order at a restaurant and not think twice about how long it takes to prepare it. Between cleaning the whole squids, slicing, then deep frying them, it took about an hour from start to finish. I doubt that starting with cleaned squid tubes would have helped all that much; besides those are usually sold frozen. Fresh squid just has a different taste and texture.

The cookbook has a vegetarian option for this recipe where instead of the squid, you use 14 oz of plain white tofu cut into bite-sized cubes then deep fried until golden.

Note: there is no black pepper nor white pepper in this recipe. The pepper here is Sichuan pepper, commonly referred to as Sichuan peppercorns. Also, two stalks of green onions were plenty for this dish. And, when deep frying the squid, watch out for the oil.. it will splatter and spit and crackle when moisture from the squid hits the hot oil.

Ingredients

1 lb squid, cleaned

1 tbsp Shaoxing wine

3 tbsp potato flour (for deep frying)

1 1/2 c neutral cooking oil, such as peanut oil

2 tbsp olive oil, for frying

2 tbsp fresh garlic, minced

2 tbsp spring onion whites, minced

2 tbsp spring onion greens, minced

1 fresh red chili, thinly sliced

1/4 tsp toasted Sichuan pepper mixed with 1/2 tsp kosher salt

Directions

1. Clean squid. You'll only be using the tentacles and the body. Trim the tentacles from the head, then slice in half lengthwise. Score the body using diagonal cuts with a knife.

2. Toss the squid body and tentacles in a bowl with Shaoxing rice wine. Let this marinate while you prep the other ingredients.

3. Drain the liquid from the squid and dredge in potato flour. Deep fry in a wok (or other appliance for deep frying) at 350 degrees F. Use a metal slotted spoon to remove the squid when it has reached a light golden brown color. Drain the oil from the squid on paper towels.

4. Drain off all but one tablespoon of oil from the wok. Add garlic, spring onion whites, and chili to the wok and stir fry over medium heat. Raise the heat to high and return the squid, Sichuan pepper, and salt to the wok. Stir and toss for a minute.

5. Add the spring onion greens last, mix well and serve.

Squid with Bacon

I was trying to think of fancier names for this dish, like ones you'd find on a pretentious restaurant menu. Here's what I came up with:

Fried calamari with roasted garlic and bacon
Herb roasted calamari with apple-smoked bacon

And then I got to thinking that a lot of recipes have delicious-sounding descriptors, but may not actually be true to how the dish is prepared. Fresh herbs, for example, are almost always added after the dish has finished cooking...otherwise they'd lose their fresh green look and be all wilted. Calamari is the Italian plural word for squid (it's "calamaro" when referring to one squid). When people imagine what squid looks like, they are usually imagining a slimy, angry, beady-eyed multi-tentacled creature wrapping its giant arms around a ship at sea. No? Ok, well, maybe that's just me.

Frying is the fastest way that I know to cook it up. But, it can also be steamed, boiled, stir fried, salted, roasted, etc. Preparation of the squid itself is the hardest part of the dish because there are so many steps to cleaning it before the body gets sliced up. And, if you don't wear gloves, your hands end up all very squid-smelling.

The original recipe ratio comes from Bobby Flay. I have never watched that particular episode, so I had to surmise what he meant by lardon bacon. I'm assuming it's diced, fried bacon, until someone informs me otherwise. Flay's recipe calls for an additional two tablespoons of olive oil after the bacon has fried, but the bacon already yields roughly two tablespoons of lard, so if I do add the olive oil, it would only be to make the finished squid look shiny. Also, since I don't live near the coast, I have never seen fresh squid at the grocery store or specialty asian market; so this recipe uses frozen squid that has been thawed to room temperature.

Squid with Bacon and Thyme

Ingredients

1 lb squid, cleaned and sliced into rings
2 slices of bacon, diced
2 tbsp parsley leaves (optional, for garnish)
1 tbsp thyme leaves
3 garlic cloves, minced
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Directions

1. Prepare the squid.

2. Fry bacon in a medium pan until it is lightly golden brown and most of the fat has rendered out.

2. Add garlic and squid, seasoning lightly with salt and pepper. Cook squid for 2-3 minutes or until just cooked through. The squid rings curl backwards and the flesh turns to an opaque white color.

3. Remove from heat and stir in parsley (optional) and thyme before serving.

Kitchen Note: Squid

Here's a first for the year. I prepared and made a squid dish. No seriously, I never made squid before today. It was the random shopping ingredient for December.

The quality of fresh squid, like most seafood, is easy to tell from visual and olfactory cues. It shouldn't have a strong nor fishy smell, be firm and shiny, and its outer membrane should be gray in color, not pink or purple. That is, of course, if you are using fresh squid. I suppose that at some point my squid was fresh. Since I didn't use it the same day I bought it, the squid had characteristics of not-so-fresh squid, as in I left it in the freezer for about a month then thawed it before preparation.

Preparing whole squid is a lot like shelling sunflower seeds: lots of effort, little reward. To put it bluntly, the only parts of the squid that is used in cooking are the tentacles and mantle (the skin, aka the tube). Just about everything else (head, guts, the hard beak, ink sack, cuttlebone) is removed and discarded. I didn't notice the ink sack when I prepared the squid. Squid ink is edible and is often used to add color to pasta, such as black linguini.

To make the calamari-shaped rings, cut the squid body into bite-sized pieces, horizontally. Here are other ways of preparing squid.

Squid can get tough if it's overcooked, so if you plan to fry it, do so on high heat with the pan already warmed up. I used 2 tbsp of olive oil for frying and added the squid just as the oil was able to spread across the pan easily. Probably no more than 5 mins for frying. Then remove it from the heat and plate it up.

The best tasting fried squid is how my folks make it--with chopped chives from their garden.