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Will the black color from squid ink spaghetti bleed onto other ingredients?
I was recently given a package of squid ink spaghetti. I haven't used it before and I want to try something creative.
I was thinking of separately cooking some regular spaghetti and mixing the white and black together after they are cooked separately. This won't look good if the black bleeds onto the white. It would just turn everything gray.
No, as far as I know pasta made with squid ink, often called nero di seppia, should be stable, and the ink doesn't normally bleed.
From my experience after boiling black pasta, even the fresh kind, the water comes out clear like with regular one, with just a bit of clear maybe slightly grayish starch being left behind.
If you boil regular and black pasta mixed together the white pasta should not get significantly tainted with black color, just like when you boil tricolore type of colored pasta (those multi colored green, red and white mixes) the colors don't bleed.
You can (briefly) see in this cooking video that neither the boiling water nor the rinsing water are darkened.
Black ink also doesn't bleed into sauces after boiling, so you can use light colored sauces without negatively affecting it's appearance, nor does it stain containers like the white ceramic of dishes, bowls or plastics.
Only situation where you should get bleeding black is for dishes where the squid ink is added to the pasta after boiling, either while stirring in the sauce or along with other ingredients, rather than being mixed into the flour.
I have cooked squid ink pasta, and did not find much bleeding. On the other hand, i’ve had SIP in a restaurant, and everything was stained black. So perhaps there’s some other variable at play.
