Ginger Calamari

Just about all of the books I've read recently have been about food; where it comes from, the craft of preparing it, the joys of eating it; the social, political, economic, environmental and health ramifications of our eating habits; as well as the interesting personalities that inhabit the culinary world. My recent reads have included Heat, The Omnivore's Dilema, Kitchen Confidential and, most recently, The Soul of A chef: The Journey Toward Perfection by Michael Ruhlman.

One aspect of these books that I've really enjoyed is cooking from them. No, these are not cookbooks, and they don't contain recipes per se (Ok, The Soul of a Chef does indeed contain recipes, but I didn't know that until after I finished the book, since they are all the way in the back. More on that in a bit), but they do contain entire paragraphs of prose on how to prepare certain dishes, from braised short ribs in Heat to perfectly roasted whole fish in Kitchen Confidential. I've attempted both dishes and they both turned out quite well.

It's fun to sometimes read a very basic description of a dish with perhaps a few sentences on how to prepare it and see how well it turns out in my kitchen. So when I read the following in Soul of a Chef, in the part of the book focused on Michael Symon, I knew I had to try it:

And he did do good food, fun food, worth noting. His fried calamari were the best I'd tasted anywhere. He wanted to get the flavor of ginger into his calamari somehow. He tried grating ginger into the flour coating, but that didn't produce the right effect. He tried putting ginger powder in the flour, but it resulted in a fake ginger taste. He began to think about batter, how some batters use carbonation as a leavener, such as beer batters. He didn't like heavy batters, but this idea led him to the idea of soaking the calamari in ginger-ale and fresh grated ginger. The ginger-marinated squid would then be coated in a peppery flour and fried. "It came out really nice," he told me. He served it with a smooth green onion sauce.

All I had to go on was this brief description, but I figured that was enough. Some squid, some ginger, some ginger-ale, flour and pepper. Surely this couldn't be difficult.

I started with a half pound of clean squid that I picked up at one of the areas best fish markets. The squid smelled of the ocean; it was extremely fresh! This gave me the confidence I needed to prepare another squid dish after getting sick the last time I did so. I sliced the squid into little rings about a half-inch wide and put the rings into a bowl, into which I then poured some ginger-ale, making sure the all the squid was covered by the ale. I then peeled and, using a microplane, finely grated an inch long piece of fresh ginger directly into the bowl. I covered the bowl in placed it into the fridge. I didn't have any guidance into how long the calamari should be marinated for, but I figured an hour should be long enough. Surely it didn't need more than that, did it? It was only after I finished reading Soul of a Chef that I learned that the calamari should in fact be marinated overnight, after first grating the fresh ginger directly onto the calamari and marinating in the fridge for 1 to 4 hours.

Even though I didn't get the recipe quite right the end result was still pretty good. After marinating I dipped the calamari into flour into which I had put a good deal of freshly ground black pepper and cooked them quickly in a pan with canola oil heated to 375 (more or less). Cooking the calamari in two batches turned out to be a very good thing, as I left the first batch in the pan for way too long. Although they were in the pan for no more than 2 and half minutes they were very, very overcooked. That batch was almost too rubbery to eat. About a minute of cooking time yielded much better results, rendering a very well textured, lightly brown, crisp exterior and a nice soft calamari interior. The second batch was VERY tasty. I can only imagine how much more intense the dish would have been had I marinated correctly. Next time that will happen.