Chef David Moyle joins our food page
My first head chef when I was an apprentice – Bill Marchetti – used to tell me stories about how, when he first came to Australia, he would buy the squid off fishermen at the jetty for a dollar a kilo. They used to laugh at him. Yesterday I went to the market and paid $34 for a kilo of uncleaned southern calamari.
When I moved to Tasmania in 2012, to open The Stackings and Franklin, I had become more and more interested in the ethics and sustainability of food. I was moving away from fin fish due to questionable practice and had really pulled away from meat. Even vegetables came under scrutiny, with soil inputs and pest management. It was a bit of a rabbit hole.
Thankfully, I turned to squid. Due to their fast growth rate and short life span, squid stocks replenish relatively quickly in the right conditions. Nothing taken from the ocean or land is truly sustainable, but southern calamari became something I was comfortable eating and representing, which is a pretty luxurious compromise.
This dish came out of trying to think of new things to do with squid. My kitchens have always been intentionally limited by equipment. This technique came out of trying to use the protein as a carb. Slicing the squid like a noodle also opened up how it could take on different flavours, either from the land or the sea. The squid should always taste like squid, that’s why I don’t dress it heavily. But you can easily sit other flavours with it.
Mushrooms are often cooked in a way in which flavour is imparted, where everything soaks into the mushroom. Here, it’s more about what’s extracted from the mushroom. The butter in the mushroom broth was about finding a way to treat it like a pasta sauce so it would stick to the squid.
Hand slicing the squid to order is the least sustainable part of this recipe.