Octopus and Potato Salad

Octopus and Potato Salad

A miracle happened this holiday season. My family ate all of the octopus.

I have been enamoured of octopus since my early twenties, when you could not find a recipe without great difficulty. My friend Remi, who had trained at the CIA to be a chef, had a large cookbook dedicated to the preparation of fish. In this compendious book there was a single recipe. The instructions were simple: boil water, add the octopus. When the water returns to the boil, remove octopus. Allow to cool some. Reemerge it in the water. Remove, cool, and return to the water a third time. Now reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for a minimum of 45 minutes, until it is tender. My next door neighbor Jon Greenberg and I proceeded to prepare octopus in this manner. Jon had lived in Italy and vacationed in Portugal. He knew the Mediterranean method of beating the octopus against a rock. He did not know the trick of adding a cork.

I first ate octopus as a child, in a bouillabaisse prepared by a family working for my parents. It was like chewing on an eraser. I next ate it at a wonderful Italian American restaurant, Vincent’s La Cantina, on the Boston Post Road in Mamaroneck. It was in a tomato and red wine based stew of seafood. The octopus was dense and chewy. The sauce was rich and tasted of oregano and tomato. It was this dish that I tried to recreate with Jon.

I also ate crunchy Japanese octopus, those vinegary, thin slices that come in sushi/sashimi platters. Japanese octopus is OK. Also, in the 90’s, baby octopus showed up at my favorite Cantonese restaurant, Sun Lok Kee, on Mott Street, fried with salt and pepper. It was a close second to salt and pepper squid. My mother used to complain that my friend Mike and I would haul our family down to Chinatown where we would order food that none of the kids could eat, and sit and talk while my wife was outside walking a screaming baby back and forth in the cold noisy neon inflected dark. Naturally I took a somewhat different view. It was after she had delivered  this rather stunning indictment of our male fatuity that once again we all made our way downtown to Mott Street, this time with my 1-1/2 year old son, Jesse. We ordered a mix of salt and pepper fried octopus and squid, and as my mother unpeeled her hairy eyeball we noticed that Jesse had devoured most of the fried octopus and was starting in on the squid. Sometimes mothers are wrong!

In recent years on our Christmas night (a blended family…older kids Z and Q go with their mother…we celebrate on the 23^rd…and I don’t really give a rat’s ass about Christmas, let me say, but I do like cooking a big feast…) I have decided to only cook seafood. I don’t do the traditional Sicilian thing really, but I try to get squid, shrimp, fish, scallops, clams and…octopus! on the menu. Octopus is different here in Ithaca than in NYC in days of yore. They are small, and they are frozen. And I am also not cooking for the same people. Jon alas is gone. The table is full of grown and ungrown children.

Preparation of frozen octopus is easy. You defrost and cook it. A fresh fellow is a different story. A fresh octopus has a head full of stuff, ink sacs and such, a beak and eyes. You must remove all of this extraneous matter before proceeding to the pot.

The first year I made a warm potato and octopus dish with garlic and smoked paprika. It was good, but a little intense. There was no contrasting flavor. Then, two years ago I had a potato and octopus salad at Arte, a neighborhood Italian restaurant on 9^th street. This has replaced Vincent’s in my culinary imagination. What that means is, the food I eat there haunts me. Is there better Italian food in NYC? Certainly! Is there cheaper Italian food? Most definitely. Do I go anywhere else? Not if I can avoid it. I have had so many wonderful, hilarious meals there with my mother, and with daughter Q over the years, I just can’t shake the emotions from the pasta.

So this octopus salad was prepared with very thinly sliced potatoes, cooked al dente, scallions, green olives, celery, capers and a lemony dressing. It was tart and crunchy with unctuous, chewy pieces of perfectly tender tentacle in each bite. This was it.

I then second guessed the ancient procedure of boiling the octopus three times and went in search of better recipes. This is the difference between now and then. Then there was one master volume of fish recipes to consult. Now there is the internet. A lovely Google search and I had as many ways to cook an octopus as I could shake a stick at. And yet, I have not tried any new-fangled octopusery procedures yet! The NY Times did research on the subject, way back in ’11 and came up with the method of stewing octopus in its own juices. I just couldn’t figure out how long it would take. So I went with old faithful and simmered it until fork tender. Then I pulled off bits of slimy, gelatinous skin, careful to preserve the essential suction cups. Next I sliced the tentacles and head into one inch pieces and combined it with lightly boiled potato slices. The other ingredients I used in small quantities. A few sliced green olives, a tablespoon of capers, a few table spoons of very thinly slice celery and a few more of scallion. While still warm I tossed them all together with 3 tablespoons of lemon juice and a ¼ cup of olive oil. Salt and pepper. It should have an acid bight. It should be served at room temperature. It should be divine.

Octopus and Potato Salad

1 frozen octopus (mine was a little over 2 lbs) thawed

Bay leaf, salt, pepper, juice of one lemon

2 cups of potato (or as much as you want) quartered lengthwise and thinly sliced (about 1/8^th of an inch)

2T sliced green olive (like cerignola)

1T capers

3T thinly slice celery, from the upper, green part of the stalk

3T sliced scallion

3T lemon juice

1/4 C good olive oil

Salt and pepper

 

Bring a pot of water to boil. Add a bay leaf, salt, pepper and the lemon juice. You can also add onion and garlic. Put in the octopus. When the water resumes boiling remove the octopus and let it rest a few minutes. Return it to the water. Again remove it and let it rest. Then add it back to the water, cover with a lid and very gently simmer until a fork easily pierces the flesh between the head and tentacles. This could be 45 minutes to an hour, or much more for a big old 5 pounder.

Remove the octopus and when it is cool enough to handle remove some of the gelatinous purple skin. It’s not bad, but you don’t want that texture in the salad. Do not try to remove all of it, and do not remove suction cups. Cut it into bit-sized pieces.

Cover the sliced potatoes with water, add a teaspoon of salt and bring to a boil. Check after a few minutes for doneness. The potatoes should be a little crisp almost. Drain. Combine with the octopus in a bowl. Add the other ingredients and then emulsify the lemon juice and olive oil. Dress the salad and taste. You can add lemon or olive oil as needed. Stir every now and then to marinate evenly. Serve at room temperature. I like to make this so it can rest for 2 hours before serving.