Hot and Sour Calamari

Posted on March 30, 2009
Filed Under Do It Yourself, Food | 1 Comment

Last Saturday was rather a tiring day, at least the first half was. Nonetheless, I still cook for dinner. I opted for something simple and not complicated to prepare.

One of the dish I cooked was Hot and Sour Calamari. For the sauce, you needed to have the ready mixed curry spices. I’m not referring to those that are sold in powder form. I’m referring to those that you need to buy from the wet market where the seller actually have the ingredients grinded into super fine form using a blender. Well, you can just walk over to the stall and tell the fellow you needed to cook curry and it will be sour base. He’ll know how to mix those up for you. Usually, the ingredients will contain red chillies, yellow gingers, garlic, onions as well as lemon grass.

Anyway, to prepare the dish, first of all, you need to clean the calamari. For the calamari’s skin, you can choose whether to have those removed or otherwise. It’s up to you. Usually I’ll have those fully removed but this time, I left them on, mainly to have more textures on the skin rather than just plain white. Another thing, for those who like the tentacles, you can have the tentacles slot inside the calamari. This will prevent it from getting over-cooked and hardened.

For the cooking, heat up the frying pan/wok with about 2 tablespoons of cooking oil over a middle flame. Once the oil is hot, put in the spices and give it a good fry. Keep frying till the spice mixture are evenly fried. After that, add in the calamari and fry them together with the spices. Once the calamari’s texture starts to harden, add on about half-a-glass of water and stir the mixture evenly. Add a small pinch of salt and some juice from a calamansi to enhance the sour taste. Let it boils and just stir the mixture for another while and it’s ready to serve. The nice part about cooking calamari is that it gets cooked pretty fast.

This is a snapshot that I took when the calamari was ready to serve.