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Friday, May 30, 2014

How do you clean a sotong ala pig style

Ok Moo, listen carefully....to clean a sotong first you must have.............(drum rolls).. sotong.
~ dodge banana peel, frying pan ~

Ok back to Moo's request. Listen up! This method is passed to me by my grandmother who learned from God knows where.
  1. First fill the sink with water or get ready a bowl of clean water.
  2. Put sotong in water
  3. Take one sotong out, hold one hand gripping sotong forehead, one hand on tail. gently pull them apart. GENTLY..they detached easily. If you are successful, you will see the whole head disengage properly with the ink pouch. DO NOT BREAK ink pouch.
  4. Detach ink pouch, you should be able to see the sac attachment. Pull the sac attachment and throw ink pouch away. 
  5. Hold head upright, tentacles facing you. Squeeze the forehead and teeth will pop up in the middle of tentacles. Use the other hand to pull mouth out. It looks like a round thing.
  6. Now comes the most 'wat tat' part of all, dig both eyes out. You need to break the eye membrane to do it. Use your nails and fingers. Sotong should look white except for skin pigment (you can peel it off if you want) once the eyes are cleaned out. Sometimes the eye juice will squirt out, so you can do this with sotong head immerse in water (the reason why I ask you to fill sink with water)
  7. Now the easy part-the sotong body. Hold sotong body the way you hold toilet paper roll, hole facing you, put hand into body and feel for back bone, it's a piece of cartiledge that looks like plastic. Pull it out. If your sotong is fat, you might want to pull out the fat bits, but be warned fat sotongs are more expensive than thin sotong so I usually leave the fat bits as it is edible. Rinse some water into sotong body. Sometimes if you 'lucky', you might find sotong's last meal in it.
  8. Last peel off sotong skin. This is optional. Leaving skin on will give sotong extra crunch. Skin is edible. In fact mamak stall leave it on when they cook. Personally I like to peel the sotong skin as it is fun.
There you have it, the basic steps to a clean yummy sotong. Line me if you need more advise.

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