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Binging with Babish: Squid Ink Pasta from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

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A cartoonishly black bowl of pasta from a Japanese manga just got the full culinary treatment on YouTube.

Andrew Rea, the host behind the wildly popular cooking channel Binging with Babish, has spent years turning fictional food into real recipes viewers can cook at home. His latest target is one of anime’s most instantly recognizable dishes: the jet-black Squid Ink Pasta from “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.” Rea walks through building the noodles and sauce from raw ingredients, treating the dish with the same rigor he’d give a French classic.

• The dish comes from “Battle Tendency” (Part 2 of “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”), where Joseph Joestar recoils at the pasta’s color before trying it at an Italian restaurant.
• Rea’s dough uses 2.5 cups of flour, 4 large eggs, and 1 tablespoon of cuttlefish ink, mixed with a dough hook for 8 to 10 minutes and rested 30 to 60 minutes.
• The sauce is built from shallot, garlic, red pepper flakes, a quarter-cup of dry white wine, tomato puree, and a second 2-tablespoon dose of squid ink stirred in right before the noodles hit the pan.

The Source Material

Squid Ink Pasta shows up in “Battle Tendency” served at Trattoria Trussardi, and the show plays its color for a laugh: Joseph Joestar takes one look at the black noodles and assumes something’s gone horribly wrong before he’s talked into actually eating it. That gag — repulsion followed by grudging approval — is exactly the beat Rea leans into when he finally plates his version, treating the ink not as a gimmick but as a real ingredient with its own flavor profile to manage.

Building the Dough From Scratch

Rea’s pasta dough is straightforward on paper but exacting in execution: 2.5 cups of flour, 4 large eggs, and 1 tablespoon of black cuttlefish ink go into a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook. He runs it for 8 to 10 minutes until the dough turns smooth and tacky, then wraps it and lets it rest for 30 to 60 minutes before rolling it thin and cutting it into noodles. The resting step matters for gluten development — skip it and the dough fights back when you try to roll it.

The Sauce and the Payoff

While the dough rests, Rea builds a sauce in a saute pan starting with shimmering olive oil, finely minced shallot, a crushed garlic clove, and an optional pinch of red pepper flakes for heat. He deglazes with a quarter-cup of dry white wine — he suggests something like Sauvignon Blanc — and lets it simmer with two tablespoons of tomato puree for 3 to 5 minutes until the wine reduces down. The fresh pasta itself needs almost no cooking time at all, going into boiling water for no more than 60 to 90 seconds before it’s fished out.

Right before the noodles go in, Rea stirs an additional two tablespoons of squid ink directly into the sauce, then tosses the just-cooked pasta straight into the pan to coat.

While cuttlefish ink carries a potent, briny smell reminiscent of the ocean, it introduces an orally subtle seafood richness that pairs well with pasta.

That’s the trick of the dish — it looks like it should taste like a tide pool, but the ink’s actual flavor contribution is quiet, more depth than fish.

Babish Continues Mining Anime Content

This isn’t Rea’s first trip into anime-inspired cooking, and it’s part of a broader pattern of YouTube creators finding an audience by taking fictional pop culture seriously enough to render it in real life — the same instinct that’s kept channels doing deep dives on franchises like FNAF and Security Breach in steady rotation. For Babish’s audience, the appeal isn’t just nostalgia for the show — it’s watching someone with real technique reverse-engineer a joke dish into something you could actually plate for dinner.

Rea has built a career on exactly this pivot from screen to stove, and it’s the same formula that’s carried the channel through everything from Ratatouille’s title dish to Krabby Patties — a reminder of why food-recreation content keeps outperforming straightforward recipe videos, the same appetite that’s kept quirky internet stunts like the viral tongue-twister challenges racking up views. Squid Ink Pasta was never going to be complicated cooking — it’s two tablespoons of ink and a short simmer — but watching Joseph Joestar’s fictional disgust turn into a real, edible bowl of noodles is exactly the kind of bit that keeps Babish’s subscribers coming back for the next unlikely menu item.