STUFFED SQUID

This dish is seafood for beginners, not only in the sense that it’s easy to prepare but also in the sense that it's easy to eat: if you have a friend/relative/boyfriend/girlfriend that refuses to eat seafood “because it looks weird”, this could be a good chance to try and enlarge the nutritional horizon of this person. You can chop into little pieces the most squiddy-looking parts, like the tentacles, and hide them inside the body, so in the end you will be serving a sort of abstract object in the shape of a cone, with a yummy and fairly harmless look, lying in a bed of rich tomato sauce. It's basically the same strategy of giving some cream of vegetables to a kid that hates minestrone.

Stuffed squid is a fairly common dish in both Spain and Italy, and you can find many different variants around. My version of the filling makes it almost a “land” dish, as it includes sausages and some parmesan (which means it should be even more accessible to all those seafood haters). The final result is supposed to create an interesting balance of rather different flavors.

Timing:

1 hour, or maybe a little more. 30-45 mins to clean, chop, sautée etc followed by 30 mins of simmering.

Ingredients for 4:

1kg of fresh squids

1 carrot

1 onion

1 celery stick

2 sprigs of rosemary

1 good bunch of parsley

White wine for cooking

1 big can of tomato sauce, around 800g. No tomate frito!

50g grana padano (or parmesan. If by chance you have to use an aged/strong one, you might diminish the amount a bit to avoid an overpowering cheese flavor)

100g old bread

150g plain, coarse-paste sausages, like longaniza fresca

Salt

Pepper

Extra-virgin olive oil

A word on squids

Careful to buy squid and not cuttlefish, which is a tougher cookie and not really appropriate for this recipe. Since squids come in many sizes, you might end up cooking several small ones or a few big ones; it doesn’t make much of a difference. Small ones means more cleaning work, big ones means that you will have to slice them to make individual servings.

It’s very easy to clean a squid. If you already know how to do it, just jump directly to the How to section. Otherwise:

*With your hands remove the membrane covering the body (with body I mean the biggest part of the squid, the sort of cone-shaped hat that you are going to stuff later). Remove also the two fins on the sides. Throw the membrane, wash the fins quickly in cold water and save them.

*Hold the top of the body with one hand; with the other hand pull the tentacles part: squishy stuff will come out attached to it, leaving the body empty.

*Cut off the squishy stuff from the tentacles using a sharp knife or scissors. Throw away the squishy stuff (although if you want you can first remove the ink sac and save it, it's great for pasta sauce. Just be careful not to break it, the ink stains like crazy. Also, it’s still a fishy thing, so it needs to be consumed quickly, better not have it sitting around for long).

*Again with a knife or scissors, get rid of the eyes and the beak in the middle of the tentacles. Wash the tentacles part and put it aside together with the fins.

*Grab the now-white body and with your fingers remove whatever is left inside – you could find some leftover squishy stuff, and you will definitely find something that looks like a transparent piece of plastic. This is called pen, and it’s a vestigial remain of a shell (interesting no?).

*Carefully wash the body, in and out...

*...and you are done. Here you can find a video of the whole process.

How to:

Roughly chop 200g of the squids’ fins and tentacles. Put them in a fairly big anti-stick pan with a splash of olive oil. Peel the sausages, break them into small pieces and add them to the pan. Turn on the heat, set it on low, and cook for some ten minutes, stirring every now and then. In this time the sausages should have changed color, and the squid should have released quite some liquid.

Put the content of the pan, including the liquid, in the bowl of a food processor. Add the bread, parsley and cheese, mix until you get a coarse paste. Notice that it should look rather “wet”; if it seems too dry and crumbly just add water a bit at a time – or fish stock if you have it handy.

[if you don't have a food processor just manually chop the parsley, grate the bread and cheese, then mix everything thoroughly with the content of the pan]

The filling is now ready, so grab the squid bodies and stuff them. Remember they will shrink quite a lot during cooking, so don’t fill them completely; just a bit more than halfway should do. Roughly close the open end of the squid using a toothpick. After this you will probably have some leftover filling: you can add it to the sauce later, or just save it for some other time.

Again put a splash of olive oil in the anti-stick pan; add the filled squids, any remaining raw tentacles/fins and sautée for 5 mins on medium heat. Turn the filled squids after 2 or 3 mins.

In the meantime, clean and chop into little pieces the onion, celery and carrot; after the 5 mins have passed, add them to the pan along with the sprigs of rosemary and some or all the leftover filling (if you have any). Cook for another 5 minutes, stirring every now and then; add a splash of white wine, and when this has evaporated, add the whole can of tomato sauce.

Once the sauce starts to boil, lower the heat, add a pinch of salt and pepper, cover partially with a lid and cook for 30 minutes or so. Add water if it gets too dry; check with a fork if the squid is tender enough, and taste in case more seasoning is needed.

This is a very versatile dish. If you serve it immediately the filling will be nice and creamy; if you put it in the fridge for a while, you will be able to cut the squid in regular slices, as the filling will become more compact, and then re-heat it. You can also use the sauce for spaghetti, or any leftover filling for fishmeatballs.