Pan-seared Calamari with Chilli and Garlic Butter

There are exactly two ways to cook calamari and be happy about it: ninety seconds, or forty minutes. Anything in between is where rubber lives. This recipe takes the first road.

Without the batter, calamari is one of the leanest, lowest-carbohydrate things in the shop — sixteen grams of protein per hundred and essentially no carbohydrate. The butter is what makes it dinner.

What you need

• 600 g squid tubes, cleaned
• 40 g butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves, finely sliced
• 1–2 long red chillies, sliced
• A big handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
• 1 lemon
• 200 g rocket, to serve
• Sea salt, cracked pepper

Ask for the tubes cleaned and the skin off. Ask us to score them too if you want — it's a fussy job with a sharp knife and we're already holding one.

How to cook it

1. Open the tubes out flat and score the inside in a diamond pattern, cutting about halfway through. Then cut into pieces roughly 5 cm square. The scoring makes them curl into neat cylinders in the pan.
2. Dry them thoroughly. Squid holds a lot of water and wet squid will never sear — it boils itself grey.
3. Very hot pan, oil only. Squid in one layer, and do it in two batches if you have to. Crowding drops the temperature and you get the grey version.
4. Sixty to ninety seconds. They curl, they colour at the edges, they turn opaque. Out. That's it — they are cooked.
5. Butter, garlic, chilli into the pan off the direct heat so the garlic goes golden rather than black. Forty seconds.
6. Squid back in for ten seconds to coat, then parsley, a hard squeeze of lemon, salt. Straight onto the rocket.

Making it work for you

The forty-minute road: if it does go tough, don't throw it out — add a tin of tomatoes and simmer it, covered, for forty minutes. It comes out tender again. That is a genuinely good rescue and a decent dinner in its own right.

Not keto: this is very good over a bowl of pasta with a little of the pan butter loosened with pasta water.

Baby octopus works with the same method — it just wants three minutes rather than ninety seconds.