How To Clean Squid Without Making An Inky Mess

Back when I was a young line cook, calamari started inching its way onto trendy restaurant menus. At the time, there was, and still is to some degree, an ideology that buying your product in its wholest form lent authenticity to a dish. Fresh calamari wasn't available, but frozen was. You could buy it semi-cleaned or you could buy it whole. The whole squid won out because of that presumed authenticity, along with the idea we got free ink from the squid to use in other dishes. 

Cleaning squid is messy work, and we had to learn to work with it quickly and cleanly because there was no time or space for errant juice or ink to cover neighboring work areas. There was also an expectation that a cook's chef coat would be pristinely white at all times. After ruining a couple of coats, I got good at cleaning squid. I had little other choice.

As ocean temperatures rise, marine populations are moving from their traditional habitats, and experts predict you'll be seeing more warm water fish and seafood on restaurant menus, squid included. Expect to see squid stuffed with ingredients like rice, raisins, pine nuts, and the squid's tentacles, or grilled, braised, or stewed. As home cooking trends typically follow popular restaurant forms of cooking, you'll surely come across more home-cooked squid recipes shortly. That means cleaning squid in your kitchen, unfortunately. Here are the lessons I learned to keep my workstation clean and chef coat ink-free.

Chefs and professional cooks tackle many jobs faster than home cooks because they approach each job in an orderly fashion, designed for speed and thoroughness. Cleaning squid is a time-consuming process, so to minimize your time in the kitchen, organize yourself for success.

You'll want to put your whole squid in one container. Grab another large container for trash and a smaller one for innards if you're collecting the ink. Then you'll want three medium containers: one for the uncleaned tubes, one for the tentacles, and the other for the cleaned tubes. Finally, you'll need a non-porous bowl (preferably stainless steel because it's easy to clean) for the ink if you're saving that for other purposes.

We'll be moving into how to clean the squid shortly, but here's a final piece of advice for efficiency. When dealing with projects like this, professional cooks will perform the same steps on all the squid before moving to the next one. If your first move is to separate the tubes from the head, do that to all the squid before moving on to the next step. This approach saves you time in motion. Picking up the squid, twisting it, putting it down, picking up a knife to cut off the head, putting the knife back down to perform the next step, and so on. You'll achieve efficiency in your motion and make the job go faster by consolidating your steps in this way.

The next step is to remove the heads. Grab your squid heads and your chef's knife for this next step. Look at the innards attached to the head to identify the ink sack to avoid cutting it.

Lay the squid head out flat and then cut the innards free of the head with a quick downward slicing motion. If you're saving the ink, place the innards in a separate bowl for processing the ink later. Otherwise, throw them in the trash container. Now, identify where the head joins the tentacles, which will be below the eyes and slightly above where the tentacles join the head. Ideally, when you make your cut, the tentacles should resemble a grass skirt with a small waistband attached. Be extremely careful not to cut too high, as puncturing or even nicking the eyes will release ink that lives behind them.

With the grass skirt identified and no danger of damaging the squid's eyes, use that same downward slicing motion to remove the head. Toss the head in the trash container and finish cleaning the tentacles.

Squids have a beak at the center of the tentacles that you'll need to remove. Grab the tentacles from the "waistband" between your thumb and forefinger. Gently squeeze at the center, and the beak should pop out. Sometimes, the beak is tenacious and may require a knife to remove. Discard the beak and toss the tentacles into a dedicated container.

Squid has a purple-ish membrane across its exterior and some "fins" at the top of its tube. It's unrealistic to think you can remove the membrane from the tentacles, so you'll see a color difference between them and the tubes when they're on your plate. Nothing says you must remove the membrane from the tube, but some people find it tough and chewy.

To remove the membrane, grasp an edge of it at the opening at the bottom of the tube between two fingers. Give the membrane a light tug upward toward the fins. If the stars align, you'll remove the membrane in one motion. If the stars don't, which is often the case, you can just grab the membrane where it tore and start tugging it again. The fins should come off with the membrane, but a gentle tug will remove them if they don't. Toss the membrane and fins in the trash and the skinned tubes into your tube bowl and repeat the process for the remaining pieces. If you're frying the squid and need rings, now is the time to cut the tube into half-inch segments.