Squid Part II

Obviously marmalade and honey are the best things to put on toast because bears have the best taste in breakfast condiments.  Marmite forcing themselves on Paddington was the ultimate humiliation; due to children's TV becoming increasingly dominated by nonsensical rubbish they slipped him a few quid to endorse their horrible product.  His heart was never in it, though, and he spat it out straight after takes.  Also, I like how my jar is the one integral to the structural stability of that stack.

So, having made squid ink tagliatelle I needed something to serve it with.  Obviously, a dish with squid made perfect sense.  Despite having prepared and cooked squid many times before, this was the first time I'd ever slow cooked it for a long time.  I had been thinking of taking it in some sort of bouillabaise direction, but in the end decided to keep it relatively simple.  It turned out magnificently.

Without further ado, recipe; (serves 4)

3 whole medium sized squid
3 small, or 2 medium fennel bulbs, sliced
1 large white onion, finely chopped
600ml lobster stock, reduced by half
200ml red wine
600g tomatoes, skinned, deseeded and chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1 tsp fennel seeds, toasted and crushed
salt and pepper
4 tbsp olive oil

Heat 2 tbsp of the oil in a large, heavy based saucepan (Le Creuset are obviously the best pans in the world).  Finely dice the onion and garlic and sweat for approximately 10 minutes until soft and translucent, but not coloured.  Place the tomatoes in a large bowl and pour over sufficient boiling water to cover.  Leave for about a minute, enough for the skins to split.  Remove the skins, quarter, remove the seeds and discard them.  Roughly chop the flesh and add to the pan.  Leave on a gentle simmer for 30-40 minutes.  Meanwhile, prepare the squid.

Preparing squid is a whole lot easier than it may seem.  A squid is a very anatomically simple creature, and consists of predominantly two parts; the main body of flesh, and the tentacles, head and insides, which are all connected and can be pulled out in one go.  Start off by, with a sharp knife, removing the tentacles from just above the eyes.  This may take the squid's mouth and beak with it, in which case gently squeeze the end you've just cut.  If a small, hard beak protrudes out, remove it. 

You can then remove the wings from the side of the body.  You should be able to find a gap around the wings through which to penetrate the thin membrane that covers the body and remove it.  The two wings can also be eaten, but need to be separated from the membrane.  These can simply be cut away from the part that was attached to the main body, which is slightly firmer than the rest of the flesh.

The plasticy quill can be easily pulled out from inside the body.  You then need to clean the main body of the squid and remove any further innards and membranes.  The best way to do this is to run it under a cold tap.  The flesh should be smooth and unblemished.  If you intend to cut it into rings, as I am doing here, you can turn the body inside out by pushing your finger into the bottom point of the body and forcing it in on itself, where you can then clean away all the various squid entrails inside.  This is open to all manner of overtly vulgar sexual imagery, the sort of depths that not even Nigella Lawson would plumb (but Kirsty probably would).  Once every extraneous part has been removed, turn the body back the right way, and slice into rings 1cm thick.  You now have your squid pieces ready to cook.

                                                 Squid; Body, wings, tentacles

Reduce the stock by about half in a small saucepan to intensify the flavour.  I've used lobster stock because that's what I had, although any kind of fish stock will do.  However, I think the rich, intense flavour from a shellfish stock suits this dish better than a standard fish stock would.  Strain the stock through a sieve to remove any bits still present and add to the tomato sauce, along with the wine, fennel seeds and bay leaves.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  Heat the remaining oil in a frying pan and briefly fry the squid pieces - no more than 20 seconds each side and add to the liquid.  Heat on a gentle simmer (the kind where maybe a few bubbles break the surface every minute) for at least 2 hours.  About an hour before ready to serve, slice the fennel bulbs and add to the pan, along with the chopped greens from the top of the bulb.  This should enable it to cook through, whilst still providing enough bite to counterbalance the meltingly soft squid. 

I only cooked this for 2 hours, but ideally I would have cooked it for about double that.  As a result, the liquor didn't reduce as much as I would have liked, so I separated the liquor away into another pan and reduced it over a high heat.  This also gave me a perfect excuse to whisk in a large knob of butter.

I served this with the squid ink tagliatelle I made yesterday, which took three minutes to cook, so you can wait until the squid is perfectly done and take off the heat before cooking the pasta.  Pasta is best cooked in an abundance of boiling, well salted water, so use your biggest pan available.  Theo Randall advises 4 litres of water for every 250g of fresh, or 400g of dried pasta, and quite frankly as far as I'm concerned, Theo Randall is the authoritative voice on pasta.  I didn't weigh the amount of pasta I had, but I cooked it in roughly 7 litres of water.

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.