Prepping Whole Fresh Squid: It's Really Not That Gross

[light music]

My name is Ben Sukle.

I own Oberlin in Providence, Rhode Island,

and we're here to show you how to

clean and process some fresh squid,

which is one of Rhode Island's biggest commodities.

It's a great product that we can get fresh here

that tastes completely different than what you're used to.

[light music]

This is how the squid comes to us

from the fishermen themself.

It's live, it has skin.

It has guts, it has all those good things,

and it's extremely easy to clean.

It just looks alien.

That's why it's a little bit more difficult

for people to approach it,

but it's a really easy cleaning process.

It's essentially gripping it and ripping it out of it.

First step in cleaning the squid is removing the pen,

which is a piece of cartilage that runs

up the middle of the tube of the squid,

which is, you know, it comes out in several pieces,

which is totally fine, and then what you can do

is grab the head and pull out, and everything comes out

in one go, so there's the guts,

there's the tentacles, there's the eye.

Everything is right there.

Next step, you can take this skin off of here,

this purple skin, so it looks like this.

So you take the fins and you pull off the skin.

And it's pretty much in two gos.

And there's your tube right there.

So what we're gonna do is cut just below the eye

on the squid and we're gonna remove the beak,

and you just slice right there,

and there you have your tube and your tentacle

ready to go right there.

Last cleaning step of the process is I like to

butterfly the squid the rest of the way,

so you just run your knife along the inside of the tube,

and you cut up, and there you'll be able to open it up

and you'll be able to remove anything

that's still in there.

Take the knife, just kinda scrape it.

Just kinda trim it right there,

and there we have this, and this is what I like to do.

This is the preferred style for when we have the squid

for grilling, nice wide open.

It grills very quick, a lot of surface area,

so a lot of grilling area as well

for the grill to pick up the char

and the good smoky flavors.

So all in all, it takes to clean a squid about 15 seconds.

[light music]