The beast upon the chopping board.
It’s a funny thing, about octopi.
By their very nature, they elicit all sorts of predictable responses, running the gamut from that is the ugliest goddamned thing I’ve ever seen in my life; to I’d like to be/in an octopus’s garden/in the shade/, etc etc etc; to the it reminds me of that scene in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; to the standard, monosyllabic yuck. One friend told me she makes it a rule to never eat any sea creatures that are smarter than she is. (That was the least predictable response.)
But one thing was certain: by the end of the day yesterday—when I’d made it clear that I was going to be cooking a four pound octopus for supper—people crawled out of the woodwork to see what, exactly, I was going to be doing to this beast, and how. In two years of writing this blog, I’ve never had quite so much interest in anything I was cooking, or how I was cooking it. And honestly, when I realized at around five o’clock that I’d be doing the yuck work myself (examining the head to make sure there was nothing lurking inside that I’d have to dispatch, for example) in order to get dinner on the table before midnight, I got a little queasy. Generally, Susan takes care of all the yuck work in the house, because nothing fazes her, except when it’s time to put the lobsters in the pot. And then she has to leave the state.
I girded my loins when I removed the bag containing The Creature from the fridge; I’d already set a big colander in the sink, so I just plopped (literally) the bag into it, when I noticed — very unfortunately — that the fish lady at Fairway had managed to tie up one of The Creature’s skinnier tentacle ends in the bag’s knot. This did not make me happy because, on the one hand, it seemed really disrepectful. It also seemed like she was fairly disturbed by the whole thing, so she hurried to get it bagged up, like Woody Allen holding up the lobster in Annie Hall, right before it runs behind the refrigerator. Whenever anyone shows up at her counter, the fish lady probably says a little prayer: Please God, don’t let anyone buy the octopus. Please. She probably never suspected that it would be me: white, Jewish, and carrying a cloth shopping bag from the World Wildlife Fund.
Anyway, I cut open the bag and begged the Lord up above that The Creature’s head would be pre-cleaned, it’s little eyes removed, and its beak snipped away (they were). I held it up to see exactly what I’d be dealing with, and frankly got a little nervous when I realized that it was almost as long as I am tall (which is not very, but when I held it up by its head, the tips of its tentacles brushed against the cabinets under my sink, leaving a bit of octo-slime on them. (“Honey, what’s that on the cabinet door?” Oh, it’s just some octopus slime. Who ever gets to say that during a busy work week?)
I laid The Creature out lengthwise on a cutting board and remembered what Bittman said in his (great) video: remove the head. Then the DMZ between the head and the legs. Then take a scissor and snip the webbing between the legs and the body. Because the head had been cleaned, I chose to slice it up, which was more than a little weird. But, waste not, want not.
Octopus legs, head in foreground.
Before I started slicing, I’d set a large stock pot filled with salted water and about a cup of vinegar on the stove, and brought it to a boil (vinegar is a great tenderizer, which is exactly what you want when you’re cooking something with a narrow window of edible opportunity — undercook it and you could play basketball with it; overcook it, and you could spread it on crackers). I added the individual octopus legs, the other slices, covered it, and let it simmer for about an hour and fifteen minutes, until it was knife tender. When it was almost done, I boiled some small potatoes in heavily salted water, and lit my grill.
And this is possibly the most important thing I can say about cooking octopus: it might be nice boiled or braised (or boiled and then braised), but really, the way to eat it is charred (which, I suppose, might have made my mother a superstar octopus-cooker). It gets all nice and smokey, and takes to olive oil and lemon very well that way, whereas boiled-just-boiled seems to me to be a little bit slippery.
Into the drink.
When the octopus legs and parts were tender, I removed them and then rubbed their skin off with the back side of a paring knife; I gather that this part is just cosmetic, but really, it’s sort of silly to use the words octopus and cosmetic in the same sentence. I put everything in a bowl with a lot — at least 3/4 of a cup — of olive oil, for 2 reasons: for the flavor, certainly. But also because I didn’t have the wherewithal to light our charcoal grill, so in order to obtain said char on a gas grill, you pretty much have to force a flare-up. Hence oil, which, once the legs and parts were actually on the grill, I reserved.
Everything was cooked, carefully and rapidly, over high heat, removed, and sliced up, along with the cooked potatoes. I tossed it all with the reserved olive oil, added a good amount of sea (what else?) salt, a handful of fresh chopped parsley, a crumbled, dried hot red pepper, and about a tablespoon of rinsed and drained capers. The whole thing got topped off and tossed again with a lot of lemon juice and even more oil (this time very good, very spicy oil).
It was delicious—really, mind-blowingly good, although not as great as it was when I had it in Greece years back—and I served it on a Fiestaware platter.
Because the first time you cook an octopus, a fiesta is definitely in order.
An octopus fiesta. On Fiestaware.
