How to Make | Cantonese Salt and Pepper Squid

Cantonese salt and pepper squid is more than just fried squid. It's coated in a thin crispy batter and taken to the next level by being stir-fried with delicious aromats like garlic, spring onion and chilli to take on extra flavour. My version is easy to make and brings a little bit of Hong Kong street food to your kitchen. This is a tasty street food tour through Asia where we'll be cooking up some of the best street eats from my new cookbook, This is a book about street food. Our next stop is Hong Kong for Cantonese salt and pepper squid. This dish is one of my favourite things to order at Dim Sum with my family and on my street food travels through Asia. So let's get started. So first step is to prep the squid. So I've got some whole squids here which I've just picked up from my local seafood market. Fresh is always best when we're working with seafood. You can buy these already sliced into the calamari rings and the tentacles themselves. So I thought I'd show you how to break down the whole squid because it's quite easy. So I've got the whole squid here. I'm just going to pull that out. So I'm just going to pat it dry first. All right so we are going to remove the tentacles and the head from the main tube or the main body. So to do that I'm just holding onto the tube and I'm pulling the head downwards. There we go. And you should just feel it just do a little click and then it should slide out quite easily. Okay so once we've done that we are going to cut the tentacles off from the head. We'll keep those and we'll discard the rest of it. Remove the beak. So the beak is just that part in the middle there and we're going to keep these tentacles. So I might just slice them into smaller bits. Maybe into like three tentacles in one part. So I'm just going to slice those in between there and there and we're going to put that into our bowl. Okay so with the hoods or the tubes of the squid what I'm doing now is basically taking out the feather or the hard part from the top. So I'm just putting my finger in there and that should slide straight out. Just like so. So now what we do from here is remove the wings from the tube. So you're just basically pressing your thumb into the back of the tube there and they just slide straight off. And whilst you're doing this you can also peel the skin off from the tube. So that's the purple part on the outside. So I'm just peeling that off like so. That noise. Okay we'll keep that. So we've got the tube right there. Let's do the same with the other one. So you can see here how easily it slides off. There we go. So I am going to take the wings off from here because we want to keep those. We can eat them. Just patting everything dry whilst I'm working with it. So now we want to open up the tube so we can slice them into rectangles. Bite-sized pieces so that we can eat them. So to do that I'm just sliding my knife into the tube running it along the edge to open it up into one open sheet. Once we've done that I'm going to go in with a paper towel and just wipe out and remove any of the inside parts. Same with this one. Sliding the knife along the tube to open it up and it really helps here to have a sharp knife to make it easier. Awesome. Okay so on the inside of the tubes I am going to score it. I'm scoring the tube in a crisscross pattern. Not all the way. It's very lightly so that when we cook it later on it will curl quite nicely. Just like a mill. One millimeter deep. So not too deep because the squid tube is already quite thin. So we just want to make very light indentations. So once we've scored it we're going to slice that into smaller rectangle pieces. So I'm going to go lengthways first and then we'll slice it the other way as well. And that can be added to our bowl with the tentacles. I'll repeat that process with the rest and we'll get on to the rest of the recipe. So what I love about this recipe is that apart from the squid it's all very simple ingredients. Things that you would have in your pantry already. So spring onion, garlic, salt, pepper, a bit of oil. And so fun to eat as well. You can use your hands once it's made. Don't need to do anything fancy with it. Alright so I think that is ready to go. Just going to clean off my board and then we will get on to the rest of this recipe. So next step is to marinate it because we want to add in extra flavor. So to that I'm adding in the tiniest bit of sesame oil. And what I like to say about sesame oil is to use it like an essence. So we just want to add in that nice sesame kind of like roasty flavor. Tiniest bit goes in. And we're also adding in Shaoxing wine. It's a Chinese cooking wine. And this goes really well with seafood so it's slightly bitter. We're going to cook it afterwards so it's not going to have that alcohol element to it. A little bit sweet, a little bit salty. And if you don't have this you could use something like a dry sherry or like a Japanese cooking wine as well. We're just going to give that a bit of a mix and set that aside to sit for about 10 to 20 minutes. Take in all of that extra flavor. Whilst it's doing that I'm going to prep the aromats for the stir fry later on. So I have garlic. Lots of garlic. Just going to add lots of flavor. I'm just going to peel them then roughly chop them. Also to go with the garlic I have some spring onion to add an extra fragrance and natural sweetness. And also some chili so just for a bit of a kick. Okay garlic is peeled. I'm just giving that garlic a rough chop. You could use a food processor if you like. I just pulse it until it is roughly chopped. It doesn't have to be too fine. All right that looks good. Set that to the side of the board. Let's slice our chilies as well. I'm just going to slice into very thin rounds. So depending on how spicy you like it you could use different varieties of chilies here. I have these long red and green ones that aren't too spicy. It's going to add a nice kind of warmth to the dish. There we go. I'm keeping the seeds in because these aren't too spicy. So if you do want to pull the spice back a bit you could remove the seeds. Okay so spring onion next and this is going to add a nice fragrance, natural sweetness. I'm just slicing the white and the green parts. So I'm actually going to keep some of the green parts for garnish later on and fry off most of the white and lighter green part because that is where all the flavor is. Okay I've sliced the rest of the spring onion. All the aromats are ready to go. Let's work on our dry coating for our squid because I think that's ready. We've already marinated the squid with sesame oil and cooking wine so it's already a bit wet. So all we need is a dry flour mix here. So for that I have a mix of flours for texture. So I have plain flour to stick to the squid and to bring the dry mix together. I also have polenta and semolina which is going to give it that nice light and thin crispy coating which is what we want. And to season we have salt and white pepper and I'm using white pepper here because it's quite fragrant. It's going to add a nice aroma to the dish as well. Give that a little mix, a little swirl. Now before we coat our squid I'm going to turn my wok on with the oil in it just to bring it up to the heat. In the recipe in my cookbook I do mention to bring it up to 180 degrees. So I'm going to show you shortly how to test out the temperature of the oil using my chopstick method. But to see how I test out the oil using a batter method make sure to watch my sweet and spicy cauliflower video. So the oil is looking really good. We're going to test with the chopstick. So whilst I place that into the hot oil it should sizzle and if it sizzles straight away, there we go. That means the oil is hot enough and ready to fry. So it's worth setting yourself up to fry. So I have a plate here lined with paper towels just to drain the squid as soon as it comes out. I've got my squid ready to go and my dry mix which I'm going to dredge the squid in. I also have a sieve here to pick up the squid with and I like to fry in batches just to keep the oil at a constant temperature. If you put too much squid in the temperature is going to drop and you won't get a crispy squid. Okay let's put our squid into the batter. So we're just tossing it to make sure it's lightly coated in that flour. Okay let's fry. So very carefully I'm going to lower the squid into the hot oil in batches. So just in case it spits I'm going to place the squid down away from me. I'll show you what I mean by that. That looks good. So squid doesn't take long to cook at all, just over a minute. But what we're looking for is a nice golden exterior on that dry batter and what the flesh will do will start to curl. So you can see there they're curling quite nicely and we've got a nice crispy outside. It's going to take that out and drain that on our paper towel. And just keeping in mind that we're going to fry it again afterwards in our stir fry. So we don't actually want to overcook it at this point. Super easy and super quick. As soon as the squid comes out a little bit of extra pepper the extra flavor. Nice. That looks good. Looks so good hey. Second batch. Oh people love to sizzle don't they? All right wasting my time. This is actually really quick to cook. See that? Super easy. I even have time to take photos. Okay so my second batch is ready. I'm going to pull that out and drain it on my paper towel. And as you can see there the coating is very thin which means it'll stay crispy for longer. A bit of extra pepper. Okay squid is ready and now it's time to add in some extra flavor with our stir fry. So I'm just going to put my wok on medium to high heat. I have all of my aromats chopped up and ready to go. We're going to add in a bit of neutral oil. So just one with no flavor. Anything will do. Something like canola veg, rice bran, peanut, grapeseed is also great. As soon as that starts to heat up. We're going to add in the lighter part of the spring onion. The garlic as well. We'll just cook that for a minute or two before we add in the chili. We're adding the lighter part of the spring onion in first because they do need a little bit longer to cook. And that's where all the flavor is. So as they start to brown around the edges we're going to add the chili in next. Chili goes straight in. Yeah it's smelling so good already. That garlic is coming through. The spring onion is also quite fragrant. Starting to brown around the edges which is exactly what we're looking for. And at this point we are going to toss our cooked squid back in along with some seasoning. So let's add in that cooked squid. Squid goes in. The green part of the spring onion goes in to season. I have salt. We have the tiniest bit of sugar. Some extra white pepper. And lastly what I like to add is a little bit of ground Sichuan pepper for a different aroma. So one final toss and it's as easy as that. I'm going to plate it up. We'll get straight into it. That looks pretty good to me. We'll make sure to get all those crunchy little bits in from the pan. All of that flavor. Don't miss any of that. I have a bit more spring onion left on my chopping board so I might just put that on top. There you go. My Cantonese salt and pepper squid. Okay. Shall we dig in? Best part. You can use your fingers. Wow. That garlic. Spring onion. A bit of like warmth coming through after from that chili. And a lot of that fragrant white pepper coming through as well. Really good. So quick and easy. I mean why wait in a dim sum line when you can make this at home for yourself. This recipe is so nostalgic for me and has been a favorite of mine for so long. And maybe can be a favorite of yours too. You can find this recipe in my new street food cookbook that's available now. Grab yours with the link in the description. Next week we'll be heading to Korea. So subscribe to find out what iconic street food we'll be making next. I love sound effects. No as in not not from from me but.