Since Japan is surrounded by ocean, it’s very easy to get very fresh seafood in any part of the country. We Japanese love squid, octopus, and any kind of chewy seafood. Italy’s geography is similar, and they also love squid and octopi. Fried calamari, Italian restaurant’s signature appetizer is basically the same thing as squid tempura in Japan.

We tend to eat octopus as is (boiled, sliced, and eaten with soy or a vinegar-miso sauce), but the Italians and Greeks took extra steps with it and created tender grilled octopus and such.

When you want to buy good octopus, you don’t go to a fish monger. The ones in Chinatown especially are so badly frozen, you will definitely end up with octopus that is so tough and chewy, no matter how you try to tenderize it.

So where to get good octopus? At the Italian market. In my case, I am specifically talking about BuonItalia in Chelsea Market, NYC. You usually go there for cheese, pasta, olive oil, or, for me, almond flour for macarons. Everything is well priced, and the variety of flours (soy, wheat, chestnut, you name it, they have quite a wide kinds of flours) is fun for trying different recipes.

I recently heard that their flash frozen octopus are some of the best octopi you can get in NYC, so I went there, and sure enough, there were plenty of frozen octopi in the freezer. I assume Polipetti means octopus in Italian.

They are not the large ones like you see at Sushi Kuni.  I’ve made takoyaki (octopus balls) with this before. Cooking raw octopus is a bit of a challenge. Large octopus tends to get very tough when boiled, so there are quite a few wacky methods people use to tenderize it. Some of the craziest ones I’ve heard are:
- Beat it up with a daikon-like object like you hate the thing
- Put the it into the spin cycle of your washer (please double bag it in very thick ziploc bag to avoid octopus-flavored clothes).

I would love to try this, but don’t want to do it in my home. But since the octopi at Buon Italia are pretty small, there’s no need to go through this.

So what I usually do is to boil it for like 30 seconds in boiling water, and that’s it.  If you want to eat as sashimi, this is the best way to cook these small guys.

This time, I read around for how to cook octopus, and tried this method. (She did use the spin cycle, but I skipped that part).

1. Cooking liquid: 1 cup of white wine, 1 halved lemon, and thawed octopus in a pot, then put enough water to cover the whole thing.
2. Put in a wine cork (I didn’t know this, but it apparently it tenderizes stuff during the cooking, who knew?)
3. Cook for about 30 minutes until octopus is tender.
4. Keep the octopus in this liquid, set aside, and let it cool down.
5. Either grill it, or use however you like

I cut each leg and coated it with olive oil, garlic, salt, and lemon and put it in the broiler until it got a nice color. I could have eaten as is, but I wanted to fancy it up a bit, so I cut up a cucumber, tomato, and made dressing with vinegar, oil, garlic, basil, bit of sugar, mustard, and Kewpie mayo. Cut octopus into bite size, mix all of them together, and right before you are ready to serve, cut up avocado, and mix it into the salad.

It’s good and tender.

By the way, this was part of a gourmet dinner party I hosted over the weekend. Here are some of the other dishes I made:
Hamachi sashimi (torched just a bit), with mixture of cucumber, red pepper, yuzu pepper, vinegar, oil, herb on top.

Prosciutto de parma wrapped pineapple with balsamic vinegar reduction.

Duck breast with onion confit over sun dried tomato risotto, with roasted asparagus.

I’ve been trying too many weird recipes recently, but I can also make gourmet dinners as well.