Spaghetti al Nero di Seppia (Spaghetti with squid ink)

This one is a little more special than the usual home cooked pasta dish. Apart from sourcing the key ingredient, squid ink, preparation and final assembly is straightforward.  Squid ink is fairly hard to find here in Singapore because most people do not use it in their cooking. You can actually find them in small sachets at the gourmet foods stores at Dempsey, going for about a dollar a sachet. You'll need one sachet for one serving to get the dark glossy colour. Otherwise, you can harvest them yourself when you buy a fresh cuttlefish!

Pan sear some scallops, prawns or squid if desired.

Spaghetti with squid ink, served with pan-seared scallops

Here are the steps for the basics of my version of squid ink spaghetti. It's a variant of the cacio e pepe recipe I posted quite early on.

Ingredients (for one, scale up proportionally for more servings):
1 handful of Barilla Spaghetti or Spaghettini
1 sachet of squid ink
Good freshly grated Pecorino Romano (you can use Parmesan as a substitute)
Olive oil
Salt
Black pepper, freshly ground

Steps:
1. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil, gently salt it. Add the pasta to the boiling water, and keep the heat up. Do not cover and stir every now and then to prevent clumping. Cook till al dente.
2. While the pasta is cooking, heat up a pan over medium heat. Dry toast the whole black peppercorns for three minutes and pour them into a mortar and grind it up with a pestle. Aim for a medium-fine grind. Return the ground pepper into the hot pan and add a splash of olive oil.
3. Add a ladle of the cooking liquid to the oil and pepper mix.
4. Cut open the sachet of squid ink and add everything into the pan. Loosen the ink and give it a good stir. Add more water if necessary, you want a sauce that is just sufficient to coat the amount of pasta you have.
5. Drain the spaghetti and put it right into the pan. Turn off the heat and give it a good toss, make sure that all the spaghetti is coated with the glossy black sauce.
6. Add in a handful of the grated cheese and stir it in.
7. Serve the pasta on a warmed dish. Grate a bit more cheese on top for garnish.

If serving with seared seafood:
1. Sear the seafood after toasting the black peppercorns.
2. Deglaze the pan with some whisky or other liquor after the seafood is seared. It will add a different flavour dimension to the seafood and the whole dish.
3. Continue with the pepper and oil mix after removing the seafood from the pan
4. Serve the seared seafood on top of the black pasta