Baby octopus

By a rough count, I spent nearly 5 months in China. That’s quite a stretch, all told. Apart from Poland, of course, I think Russia and Mongolia are the only places I’ve spent longer. As you can probably guess, seafood isn’t exactly traditional local grub in Russia or Mongolia.

I ate a lot in China. A lot of strange things. Cooked in strange ways.

The strangest dish I ate in China (no, it wasn’t dog, snake or locusts, though I ate those too) was noodles with boiled seafood. In other words, noodles with jelly.

Vile stuff. A mate and I were in Hong Kong. Around 4 in the morning we got hungry, and since we were travelling on a shoestring, we went to a typical Chinese eatery. Never mind that it looked like one of our Polish milk bars in the late 80s (the only ones I remember, hardly surprisingly, since I only lived through part of one year of the 70s). Never mind that the waiter behaved like someone out of Monty Python. That’s another story.

What matters is that when the dish we’d picked at random from the menu finally made its way to our table (the menu was all in Chinese squiggles and, Hong Kong or no Hong Kong, nobody there spoke English), we embarked on a vicious battle between brothers. The game was called “point to my food”. In other words, who had to eat what next.

We were desperately hungry, and what was on the plate looked utterly inedible. It was seafood (no, not a single prawn) that looked worse than grilled locusts or a whole frog deep-fried on a stick. Among these “delicacies” were some baby octopuses.

I assure you, if you’d told me then that a few years down the line I’d be cooking baby octopus myself, and what’s more, raving about how wonderful it tasted, I’d have given you a good… well, it might have made me a bit cross.

But life plays tricks on us, as we know. These days I find octopus absolutely delicious. Certainly not boiled (like those ones, tasteless lumps of jelly), but grilled or pan-fried it’s a real treat for me. Today I made it myself.

What I cooked was baby octopus, bought frozen. I’d been looking for fresh octopus for ages without finding any. A while ago I was in Leclerc and spotted the frozen ones. As luck would have it, a bona fide Frenchman ahead of me in the fish queue was buying those very octopuses. That clinched it for me: they had to be OK.

And they are. Definitely cheaper than prawns (I paid about 35 PLN per kg). Maybe not quite as delicate or delicious, but worth cooking.

I went looking for a recipe and settled on what was probably the best of the lot, Agnieszka Kręglicka’s. Here’s the source: Wysokie Obcasy. I’ve seen this recipe on plenty of blogs, though few of them said where it came from 🙂 I’ve tweaked it a bit. Read on and check the original and you’ll see where.

So how did my octopus turn out? Very, very. Oh. I can’t be modest about this one. Very indeed. Granted, it’s not the sort of dish you knock up in five minutes flat, but it’s worth the time. Give it a go!

At a glance: 

Prep time: 70 minutes

Serves: one (sadly, 500 grams of frozen octopus leaves you with about 150, maybe 200 grams on your plate)

Calories: how many times a year are you planning to cook octopus? You can probably stop worrying about calories for that one day in…

Ingredients for a tasty summer salad (could just as easily be a winter one):

• half a kilo of frozen baby octopus
• a pot of fresh, growing parsley
• half a bulb of young Polish garlic
• a glass of dry white wine
• olive oil
• 4 bay leaves (dried)
• salt
• ground black pepper 

Method (get two frying pans ready):

I let the octopuses thaw (in their own time, without hurrying things along with boiling water, for instance). I cleaned them by cutting out the inedible centre (I copied the technique from here, and the photos below show the heads and the bits to discard), and made three piles: the arms, which are the best bit, the heads, and the inedible centres I’d cut away. I threw the centres out.

I got the olive oil nice and hot in a frying pan (8 on my scale of 1 to 10), then added the arms and heads. They released water quite quickly and basically stopped frying and started boiling. This amounts to blanching the octopuses instead of boiling them before the actual frying or braising. The idea is to let them release the “bad” water and get them ready for frying proper. You can see what that looks like in the photos below. What started out as soft jelly has sort of tensed up into octopuses 🙂

After a few minutes of blanching, once the cloudy water had evaporated, I added about half a glass of dry wine. I let it evaporate and fried the octopuses for about another 4 minutes. The whole blanching stage in the pan with the oil took about 12–14 minutes.

I drained the octopuses (I threw out the oil and washed the pan. I felt a bit of a mug, to be honest: I could just as well have blanched them in a pot and saved myself washing the frying pan).

While the octopuses were blanching, I made a pesto with the garlic and parsley. I put almost all the parsley from the pot (the standard sort you buy in the fresh herb section) and the peeled garlic cloves in the blender jug, added ground black pepper to taste and blended everything with 4 tablespoons of olive oil to make the pesto.

I poured the oil I’d prepared with the parsley and garlic into the pan (see the photo below) and heated it, not too hot this time. In went the octopuses and 4 bay leaves. I gave it all a good stir. After a minute I turned down the “flame” (from 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 down to 3 on my hob) and put the lid on. I braised them for about 15 minutes, then added the rest of the wine. I stirred, put the lid back on and braised them for about another 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

After about 45–50 minutes the baby octopuses should be tender. That’s it. I garnished mine with fresh parsley and served them with rocket, diced fresh cucumber and a few pieces of fresh jalapeño. And a fresh baguette, of course. Enjoy!