How To Prepare Squid

Hi there. I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School and today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Hi there.

I'm going to show you how prep squid. The first thing we need to do is to prepare the squid. I've got a cupful here and it's very, very simple.

You've just got to be a little bit less squeamish about how you do it. You need to pull the head away from the main body and you'll find it comes out straight away like that. And then, there's a quill which we don't need, which is in the main body.

Now over here, it's only the tentacles that we want so as you can see the eyes' here and if we just cut just below the eye, we end up messing, that's the squid ink. So we've taken that off. Sometimes, that's referred to as the baby octopus you get in Linguini Pasta but you've got the squid tentacles there.

The eye, the rest of the body can go in the waste. What we need to do now is just trim this down and if you want to peel away the wings, in Italy, obviously, they cook everything meaning that they're less resourceful and most of the time it's not cooked and it's considered not quite as nice. I think, just in the interest of you know, having a better cleaner planet, let's suggest, that we do eat them.

So, I'm just going to take off the outer membrane there on both sides and then you've got those there and finally same sort of thing, you'll find the outer skin, just peels off of the main body. And there are a number of ways that you could do this. Now, for example, you could stuff things in there and roast them off.

You could cut them into rings and then dust them in breadcrumbs and fry those off or we could do, what I'm going to do now, which is just split open the outer belly, just scrape away any of the remaining bits that we don't want to eat there. And then if you just turn it over to the shiny side, what I'd like to just do, is just very gently slash the squid over that side and there you have your prep squid. .