Pan-Fried Octopus with Cherry Tomatoes

Today I went out for prawns and came home with an octopus. Not a baby one, like those in the baby octopus recipe you may already know from Prymitywna Kuchnia, but a regular, fresh, beautiful one, already cleaned of its beak and all that. The kind they serve at Gessler’s or Der Elefant.

So I came home with an octopus, although I hadn’t planned to. I managed to buy prawns too, but they went into the freezer. Then the fun began. Boiling, preparing, frying. An octopus like this is no easy ride, but it worked and came out very tender, with an extraordinarily interesting flavour. And eating it really made me feel good. So I recommend it wholeheartedly, although tentacles on a plate obviously won’t be everyone’s thing. Delicious!

The price of this fresh octopus was a very pleasant surprise too. Just under 44 PLN per kilogram, and fresh at that — very reasonable, much cheaper than prawns, with genuinely comparable quality. In terms of taste, although of course the flavour itself is completely different. I bought it at Leclerc, which has no equal among supermarkets when it comes to seafood (this isn’t an advert, just my subjective opinion :).

Recipe details:

Preparation time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Serves: a couple

How many calories: a beakful of calories

Ingredients for perfect octopus:

• 1 fresh octopus (mine weighed 70 dag; that size serves a maximum of two people)
• 1 large onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 5 bay leaves
• 6 allspice berries
• 6 black peppercorns (whole)
• ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 50 ml dry red wine (I had a perfectly decent, though not particularly expensive, Chianti; I think it’s a great dry wine for cooking)
• 6 cherry tomatoes (mine were raspberry tomatoes)
• 7 sun-dried tomatoes
• a large handful of fresh rocket
• a 15 cm piece of fresh cucumber
• olive oil (always first-pressed)

Recipe for fresh pan-fried octopus:

Ideally, divide the work into the following steps:

1. I washed the octopus thoroughly (I bought it already cleaned and with the beak removed), put it in a large pot, covered it with water and added bay leaves, allspice, whole peppercorns and a tablespoon of salt. I also added half a large onion. I put it on the „heat” and cooked it. Cooking takes about 50 – 60 minutes, depending on the size of your octopus. Mine was „medium”, so I cooked it for 55 minutes.

2. While the octopus was cooking (over a low heat), I prepared the remaining ingredients. First, the salad (which is part of the dish, but you can skip it if you want to serve the octopus with something else). I chopped the washed rocket fairly finely. I finely diced the cucumber. I cut 5 sun-dried tomatoes into thin strips. I combined all the ingredients, lightly seasoned with ground black pepper and salt. I added literally half a teaspoon of olive oil and mixed. The salad for the octopus was ready.

3. I finely diced the other half of the onion (the first half was cooking with the octopus). I crushed the garlic cloves and cut them into thin strips. I heated olive oil in a frying pan and fried the onion and garlic. When the onion turned translucent, I switched off the „heat” and set it aside.

4. I scalded the cherry tomatoes (mine were strawberry tomatoes) with boiling water (well, what else 😉 and peeled them. I cut them into 4, 5 pieces and put them in a bowl (leaving out the tomato seeds). I finely diced the remaining 3 sun-dried tomatoes. I added them to the bowl of chopped fresh tomatoes.

5. Once the octopus was cooked (it takes on a sort of tense, stiff shape :), I let it cool a little and dried it with kitchen paper. I cut it into parts: tentacles separately, head separately, and the section between the head and tentacles. I was being extravagant today: I discarded the entire head and the section in between, and trimmed off the thin tips of the tentacles too. So I kept only the tentacles for the rest of the dish, but if you like, the head can certainly be used. I also cut the tentacles into 2 – 3 pieces (depending on their size).

6. I reheated the pan with the onion and garlic and added the cut-up octopus tentacles. I seasoned lightly with ground black pepper and fried for about 2 – 3 minutes over a fairly high „heat”. Then I added the tomatoes (cherry and sun-dried) and stirred. I fried over a medium heat for about another 3 minutes and added literally 1/4 cup of dry red wine. I increased the „heat” so the wine would evaporate quickly, and stirred. After roughly a minute, the octopus was ready.

7. I served the finished octopus on a plate with the rocket, tomato and fresh cucumber salad, accompanied by thinly sliced baguette spread with butter. Enjoy!