Fideuà #2: Squid, Ham, Spaghettini

For a more traditional Fideuà than before, we broke up spaghettini. Using liquid from cooking octopus gave it a fantastic depth and richness. This improvised dinner was short on measurement but long on taste.

The finished dish

I used 225 g / 8 ounces spaghettini we had on hand. To break it into short pieces, I put them into a large ziptop bag, rested this on a towel, and whacked it about every 5 cm / 2 inch with the back of a cleaver. This worked pretty well: good breakage and no pasta sprayed across the kitchen.

Spaghettini, mostly broken into short pieces

We like the Catalan habit of combining shellfish and pork, so I used squid tentacles and some ham cut into fork-friendly pieces. The protein probably added up to 225 g / 8 ounces.

Mis en place by the side of the BBQ

I knew I wanted to toast the spaghettini but figured it would be finicky to remove from our paella pan later, so I started sautéing everything else first. Olive oil is traditional but I had some lovely bacon fat lying around that would amp the ham flavor. In a paella pan on the barbecue, I first sautéed a diced onion, several shaved cloves of garlic, and some diced small tomatoes from the garden. I then added the ham and squid. My fire wasn't as hot as I expected, so rather than browning well, the veggies and squid released a fair amount of liquid: this turned out to be a good thing. I pulled out the solids and poured the flavorful liquid into separate bowls.

Next, I added some more bacon fat and my broken spaghettini. I stirred this around until it started browning a bit, and getting a little aromatic. I used this opportunity to further break the now-fragile strands into smaller pieces with my stirring spatula.

Pan roasting the noodles in bacon fat

I then added the reserved liquid and maybe a cup of juice we'd saved when we cooked octopus sous vide; it was enriched with some roasted red pepper liquid from the previous cooking and had a great aroma.  This cooked a while until the spaghettini started becoming pliable, at which time I added back the meat and veggies, and topped with a gremolata of minced orange peel and parsley. It smelled divine.  When the spaghettini was al dente, I added a sprig of rosemary, covered with foil, and let it rest enough for the pasta to finish cooking.

For service, we portioned it out and topped with a fiercely garlicky toum (my new favorite condiment) and a squirt of lemon juice. It was pretty excellent.

Served with toum and lemon juice

There were some strands of spaghettini that didn get completely cooked; I expect that they were so long that they never got immersed in the broth.  I recall the fideuàs I've had around Barcelona had a slight crunch to the noodles, perhaps they finish over a very hot flame to develop a crust, a socarrat; maybe they finish under a broiler to crisp the top. We'll work on these next time.

Toum: fiery garlic sauce (without eggs)

This crazy intense garlic sauce is like a mayonnaise or aioli but contains no eggs which are typically used to emulsify those classics.  It's become a staple in our kitchen, good on paella, potatoes, vegetables, grilled octopus, and shockingly good on pizza. It's easy to make in a food processor.

A strong stable emulsion, without any egg

We had squid with a fiery garlic sauce that was blindingly white at a small Sicilian place, Caffe Sport, in San Francisco decades ago; that flavor and color have stuck with me to this day. We've tried to create it with various aioli in Catalan, Spanish, and French styles. The French ones use egg, which gave a yellow color and diluted the flavor; Jose Andres does the classic Spanish prep, crushing garlic in a mortar and pestle and adding oil drop-by-drop; we've tried it, only to have it break when we finished 30 minutes later.

We found a Lebanese garlic sauce called "Toum" that sounded right: lots of garlic, plus oil, salt and a bit of lemon juice -- no egg.  We whipped one up based on the Serious Eats recipe, which was similar to many others we found.  Garlic is whizzed in a food processor with some salt to break it down, releasing the juices that contain the weak emulsifier, then oil is added very very slowly to establish the emulsion, then alternate lemon juice and oil to finish. 

When you've finished the sauce, don't be tempted to add (say) more lemon juice and whiz it up again: the emulsion will break when you turn on the processor.  The garlic should be fresh: old or frozen or processed won't set up as a stable emulsion. You can rescue it by whizzing an egg in the empty processor then drizzling in the broken Toum, and it will taste fine: but it's cheating with the egg, and doesn't have quite the pure garlic burn: it's an aioli. 

The flavor is a bit shocking right after making it, but it softens with time. We keep it in the fridge but it might be stable without refrigeration: unlike eggs in mayo, none of Toum's ingredients requires being chilled. We've substituted Sherry Vinegar for the Lemon and it came out very well for a Spanish dish we were serving. 

Makes almost 500 ml [16 ounces] of sauce. 

 75 g   2.5 oz   Garlic heads, peeled (see technique below)
  6 g     1 tsp  Kosher Salt
 30 ml    2 Tbs  Lemon Juice
350 ml  1.5 C    Oil, Canola (neutral flavored)

Ingredients assembled

Put the garlic heads into a metal mixing bowl and cover with another. Shake violently: the heads will break apart, the paper will start separating; pull out the peeled cloves and repeat a couple times until all coves are peeled. This takes just a few minutes.

Garlic after first shake in mixing bowls

Add Garlic and Salt to food processor and process to break down garlic and release internal emulsifiers as much as possible; you may want to scrape down the sides a bit.

Garlic (lots of it) and coarse Salt to break it down

Drizzle the Lemon Juice in so that it provides liquid to turn the garlic into more of a paste consistency, scrape down once or twice; it should be mostly mush, with some garlic bits.

Not quite broken-down enough yet, scrape and process a bit more

Slowly drizzle in the Oil -- my processor top has a feed tube with a small hole that releases a slow drizzle for just this kind of operation; the sauce should start turning into a rich emulsion in a minute or two, you can hear the change in texture, but I run it for a few minutes and don't bother scraping down during this process.

A thing of beauty: thick and fluffy, and very smelly :-)

Scrape out into serving or storage containers. 
Do try it at its freshest, it's an eye-opener.