Squid Part I

I love squid.  I love cephalopods in general.  They're possibly the most fascinating creatures in existence.  I have an octopus tattooed all over half one of my arms.  Eating them is particularly enjoyable.  I'll readily admit that at least a small percentage of this comes from other people's obvious disgust at them. Euurgggh, tentacles.  Although the tentacles are obviously the best part.  I suspect that large numbers of people who claim to have tried and not liked squid just had it poorly cooked, as it has to be cooked for either very little or a very long time; anything in between and it'll be like eating rubber.

As I mentioned in my introduction, my first taste of squid was a case of mistaken identity amongst deep fried snacks in a pub masquerading as a bona fide tapas joint.  I think I was in my early teens, a time when my eating habits still had a tendency to dismiss things that were aesthetically uncommon.  Whether or not I would have eaten it if correctly identified remains to be seen.  In this instance it seems, fortune favoured the obliviously brave. 

So given my love for squid and my current propensity for making pasta it's a wonder that I've not combined the two before, even more so that it took a suggestion from a friend at work for me to even think of it.

My first two attempts at making pasta were using the recipe from a book I bought in Venice called Venice, Food and Wine.  Neither attempts were anything close to what I'd call a success.  Since the publication of Theo Randall's Pasta I have been using his recipe without even a hint of a sideways glance, let alone looking back.  In contrast to the recipe of my initial attempts, Randall's recipe uses more flour than semolina and a whole load of egg yolks.  This is the first time I've strayed from the book by adding ingredients, in this case squid ink.

The basic recipe calls for;

300g Italian tipo 00 flour (although I've used Waitrose Very Strong Canadian White Flour)
100g semolina
2 whole large eggs
6 large egg yolks

I've found Clarence Court Burford Browns to yield very good results as they have deeper, richer yolks than any other shop bought egg I've seen.  They do tend to run quite a gamut of size difference per box, so I've usually had to use seven yolks rather than six.  For this recipe I've substituted one egg yolk for two small sachets of squid ink.  This actually resulted in a more moist dough, but not so much as to make it unworkable.

I should point out here that I am in no way positioning myself as any kind of authoritarian voice on pasta making, neither should it be interpreted that way.  Far from it.  Due to my early failures I'm still running a fairly marginal aggregate of good-exceptional-poor pasta dishes made.  On a fundamental level, making pasta is relatively straight forward, but within that there is a significant range for fluctuating success, or indeed disasters of monstrous proportions. 

Theo Randall suggests it easiest to make the dough by simply putting everything in a food processor.  I've taken the, literally, more hands on approach of mixing by hand, not for any reasons of pretense, but simply because I've never been bothered to hunt down the food processor.  The resulting amount of dough is best cut into four for ease of rolling.

Repeatedly rolling the dough through a pasta machine allows the gluten in the flour to develop, which will result in a stretchy, elastic, and most importantly workable dough.  Pass the dough through the widest setting, then fold it back on itself, rotate and repeat.  (There may be a more specific reason for rotating, but at the very least if you pass it back through the machine folded end last you will most likely end up forcing bubbles of trapped air to pop out as it goes through.)  You can do this almost any number of times, and different sources will no doubt insist on varying numbers of repetitions.  I've tended to repeat as many times as has felt necessary rather than stick to a specific amount.  You can end up overworking it and making a mess of the dough, but one thing I've discovered is that you can usually atone for mistakes by reforming and rolling it through again.  Once you have reached a desirably smooth and elasticy texture, you can pass it through on incrementally narrower settings.  It's a good indication of the quality of your dough as to how well it stands up and remains manageable the thinner it becomes.  For the tagliatelle made today, I rolled it out to the fifth setting.  For ravioli I've found the eighth setting to provide the best results.

Tagliatelle benefits from being made the day before cooking, so mine has been put in the fridge on trays dusted with semolina to prevent sticking and covered with greaseproof paper.  Part two tomorrow.