Not All Squid Are Created Equal

Breakfast, Friday April 30: fruit; roasted garlic bread; leeks and calamari.

I kept the squid really simple. I wanted the squid to be the star here so I just sauteed the leek in a little butter, tossed on the squid for a minute and finished with a little pepper. There was just one teeny little problem. I should, however, start at the beginning.

A few days earlier I was grocery shopping and spied the prettiest leeks in the produce section. I'm not sure how a leek is "pretty" but there it is. Anyhoo I bought a bunch and used part in some low country boil. So at this point I'm sitting on half a leek not spoken for. Meanwhile we go to a local seafood market to get some shrimp for the aforementioned boil. I should mention that this market deals in shrimp right off the boat. If a captain had a good arm he could throw shrimp from his deck and hit the building. 

So we walk in and they have the usual local offerings: shrimp of various grades; local flounder; croakers; and this time a bin of squid on ice. I bought the shrimp I came for and some squid. 

Prepping squid is a little bit of a process. First you have to pull the tentacle part out of the main body. then squeeze/dig out anything left behind inside the body. Finally you need to pull the pen out. It is a clear cartilaginous quill pen shaped thing. It pulls right out. OK, done with that part. Now for the tentacley part. Lay it out and observe that from one end to the other there are the tentacles, a short section that forms a slightly thinner "waist," then there are the googly eyes and finally the gooey stuff that came out of the body. Slice that sucker across that waist. In other words between the tentacles and the eyes. Toss the eyes and attached guts. There's one last thing to do, remove the beak. At the center of the tentacles squid have a mouth that has a sharp bony beak. If you squeeze the tentacle base the beak should pop out where the eyes were cut off. Pitch that and you are done.

Now the squid that I am familiar with should be cooked very lightly. Cook too long and they become chewy. As I said earlier, "I just sauteed the leek in a little butter, tossed on the squid for a minute and finished with a little pepper." The end result was very tasty but required considerable mastication. They were chewy as hell. It was more reminiscent of my experience with octopus. With octopus you have 2 choices. Pound the hell out of it to make it tender or cook it for a couple of hours. So I think this squid was more like octopus in that regard. It was tasty, but man was it some work to eat.