Calamares en su Tinta — Squid in Its Own Ink · Karlos Arguiñano

Tear the 2 slices of bread into pieces and leave them to soak in a little of the white wine until they are completely soft.

💡 The soaked bread is the thickener for the whole sauce — there is no flour anywhere in this recipe. Let it get properly soggy or it will not blend smooth.

Boil the egg for 10 minutes, cool it under cold water, peel it and chop it small. Set aside.

Clean the squid: pull the head away from the body, cut the tentacles off just above the eyes, and squeeze out the hard little beak at their centre. Pull the transparent quill out of the tube and rinse it inside and out.

💡 Keep the fins — they are chopped into the stuffing along with the tentacles. Discard only the eyes, the beak and the innards.

As you work, look for the silvery ink sac among the innards of each squid, lift it out whole and drop it into a small bowl. Strain the ink you collect and keep it with the 2 shop-bought sachets.

💡 Ink sacs are fragile and burst easily, which is exactly why the recipe buys sachets as well — do not panic if you lose a few. Straining matters, though: unstrained ink carries grit.

Chop the tentacles and fins into small pieces. Dice the 3 slices of serrano ham.

Warm a little olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat and cook the diced ham for a couple of minutes until the fat turns translucent and it smells nutty.

Add the chopped tentacles and fins and sauté for 2–3 minutes, until they turn from translucent to opaque and tighten up.

💡 Short and hot. Squid has two textures — a couple of minutes, or forty. Anything in between is rubber, and this filling only gets its short cooking here.

Stir in the chopped boiled egg and the 30 g of rice, warm everything through for a minute, then drain off any excess oil and set the filling aside to cool.

💡 The rice goes in raw and cooks later inside the squid, drinking up the juices as it swells. Which is exactly why the next step matters.

Now the sauce. Dice the 3 onions and the 2 garlic cloves and cook them slowly in a pot with olive oil over low heat, about 20 minutes, until completely soft and sweet with no colour.

💡 Three onions to sixteen little squid is not a mistake. Onion is the body of this sauce, and the long slow cooking is where its sweetness comes from to balance the iodine edge of the ink.

Add the glass of tomato sauce, the wine-soaked bread and all the ink — both the strained squid ink and the 2 sachets. Stir until the pot turns properly black.

Pour in enough water to cover, bring it to a simmer and cook gently for 15 minutes.

💡 The source just says 'agua' with no amount, which is normal in Spanish recipes — you are judging by eye. Cover the solids and no more; you can always thin the sauce later, but you cannot un-thin it.

Blend the sauce until completely smooth and pass it into a wide pot. If it is thicker than a pouring cream, loosen it with a little water.

💡 Push it through a sieve after blending if you want the glassy, restaurant-black finish. Not compulsory, but it takes two minutes and the difference is obvious.

Season the squid tubes lightly inside and out, then spoon the filling in — only about two-thirds full — and close each one with a cocktail stick.

💡 Two-thirds, not full. The raw rice swells as it cooks and a tightly packed squid will split open in the pot and spill its stuffing into the sauce.

Lay the stuffed squid in the black sauce in a single layer, cover the pot and cook on low heat for 20–22 minutes.

💡 Barely a simmer, and resist lifting the lid every two minutes. If the squid still feels tough at 22 minutes, do not raise the heat — just give it another ten or fifteen quiet minutes and it will let go.

Serve four squid per plate with plenty of the ink sauce spooned over, and a sprig of parsley on top for the one flash of green.