Perks Of The Job #6: Octopus Ink - Nature's Black Food Colouring

A while back I wrote about arroz negro, a dish of rice cooked in squid ink attributed to Joaquim Koerper, proprietor of La Gigantea at the Hotel Mas Passamaner in Tarragona where I undertook my first brief training stage in Catalunya.

The arroz negro in question had already been prepared in a professional kitchen at my previous place of work, so all that was left for me to do was warm it through in a pan with a little olive oil and water. This time, however, I started from scratch. I went directly to an alternative source of that mystical black food colouring - the octopus. The strange, pearl-like globules you can see in the photo are the individual ink sacks of hundreds of baby octopi ("pulpitos" in Spanish), painstakingly squeezed from the heads of these miniature cephalopods by yours truly.

We use pulpitos at work for a rice dish, and they must be cleaned beforehand by removing the ink sacks and carefully clipping off the mouths from the underside, at the base where the tentacles begin.

On delivery, one batch of the baby octopi means a box containing a good few thousand of the blighters sitting on crushed ice. Preparing them is long and tedious work, so it's only fitting that such a task comes with a generous reward. And that reward is being able to take some ink sacks home and make arroz negro for yourself, your flatmates and friends. In the bowl on the left is the raw ink, ready for cooking. I obtained this by blitzing up the ink sacks with an immersion blender and passing the resulting jet-black mess through a fine sieve.

In order to make a home-cooked arroz negro from scratch, you begin by making a stock with the octopus ink, as a base in which to cook the short-grain rice. I started by sautéeing off some roughly chopped Spanish onions in olive oil, with a little added garlic & guindilla oil. I cooked the onions gently until they were translucent and had softened up considerably. Then I smashed up three cloves of garlic and threw them into the pot to perfume the onions and add some extra depth of flavour.

Leaving the onions to sautée together with the garlic for quite a while allowed natural caramelisation to occur slowly and a gentle sweetness to be achieved in the finished product. At this stage, in went the octopus ink to deglaze the pan and cook slowly for half an hour or so. The photo on the left shows the resulting stock in all its filthy, murky glory. So now I had my magic, salty, black dye all that was left to do was cook my perfectly white rice in it. And that I did...

Some time later... The ink has now reduced down to a dry, glutinous sauce that binds the grains of rice together much like a risotto. Finally, no arroz negro would be complete without a big fat dollop of spicy all-i-oli to ripple through the melting heat of the rice. Here's a dish that could just as easily be adapted to a Michelin starred restaurant's menu as it could be served in hefty portions at a hearty banquet for the local villagers.

Either way - whether presented as fine dining or rustic fare - this is real Catalan soul food.