How to choose the right squid?

There are more than two hundred species of squid. It is recommended to buy squid frozen or chilled. This product belongs to the perishable varieties, therefore, it is not sold or stored without preliminary refrigeration.

Frozen and chilled squids are sold as:

• carcasses (whole squid);
• rings (chopped squid carcasses);
• fillet (most often this is the meat of large squid, which cannot be sold as a whole).

How to choose squid

Squid cleaning is a rather complicated and time-consuming procedure. Some manufacturers sell refined seafood. It is better not to buy peeled squid. The fact is that cleaning the carcass without damaging it can only be done with your hands. To clean a large number of squid, special compounds are used that simply eat away at the film. This is how the process of cleaning seafood that appears on store shelves takes place. Squid after such processing lose more nutrients and their taste.

It is recommended to buy small squid carcasses with unpeeled skins, which are sold only frozen. When purchasing other types of seafood (rings and fillets), the risk of buying squid treated with chemicals increases several times. Regardless of the form in which a product is sold, the same rules always apply to determining its quality.

What squids should you buy:

• if squid carcasses are bought, then they should be easily separated from each other;
• the film covering the squid carcass is never monotonous (its shade can vary from pinkish to gray-purple);
• good squid meat can only be white or cream;
• the squid carcass should be elastic and dense in texture;
• squid carcasses should not be damaged;
• if seafood is sold in containers, then the packaging must be intact, without tears, punctures or other damage;
• small squids are more pronounced in taste than large specimens;
• the squid carcass must retain its shape (it is worth refusing to buy squid in the form of a briquette).

What squids you shouldn’t buy:

• stuck together squid carcasses should not be bought, during the cooking process they will fall apart and may have a bitter taste;
• stuck squid carcasses may also indicate that they have been repeatedly frozen and thawed;
• the change in the white shade of squid meat occurs with age (if its color is not white, then the squid is old, and after cooking it will be too tough);
• squid skin is the best indicator of freshness, so it is better not to buy refined seafood;
• yellow or gray skin can only be in stale squid;
• if the squid meat has shades or it is not white, then the squid was stored incorrectly and has already begun to deteriorate;
• discoloration of squid meat may occur due to the presence of dyes in the packaging material, but this only happens when seafood is thawed and then frozen again;
• it is impossible to buy expired squid in any case, such seafood can cause serious poisoning;
• large squids can differ in taste (the size of the seafood is usually an indicator of its age);
• if there is frost or snow inside the package, then the squids have already been defrosted;
• squid carcasses that have lost their shape are not worth buying.

You can identify low-quality squid by smell. If the squid clearly smells of old fish, then its taste will be bitter, and during the cooking process it will foam a lot. Cooking old seafood is much more difficult for young individuals.