Octopus Salad

My husband loves octopus. He is a sap for any restaurant that has octopus or calamari on the menu. I am not great at cooking octopus; however, my good friend from Croatia is a great octopus cooker. He stews the octopus in a rich tomato broth and serves it over polenta. I have asked him the trick and he says put a cork in the pot while boiling the darn thing. When I did that, all of the suction cups fell off the tentacles before the arms of the octopus were tender. I took it out of the water thinking that a quick grill would do the trick to make it tender. It was like eating rubber. I do not like cooking octopus.

Thank goodness octopus is not an easy thing to find in my grocery store. I always have the excuse, “I couldn’t find it”. One day my husband didn’t believe me and began looking on the internet and calling our various Japanese markets asking, “do you have octopus?’. He not only found it, but found COOKED octopus, steamed fresh in Japan, then frozen and flown to the states.

Here is a recipe we cooked tonight for an octopus salad that we developed from a dish from our friend’s neighborhood tapa’s bar. We LOVED the place, every dish was perfect and to make it even more special, our waiter was from Barcelona and lived and worked in our old neighborhood!

Here is my best rendition of the salad we created tonight. It was a first course with a Rhone style wine, a 2007 Tablas Creek Vineyard Esprit De Beaucastel Blanc. After the salad I served grilled hanger steak in a chanterelle mushroom sauce with crushed Yukon golds and roasted kale. My husband served that with a 2000 Ridge California Monte Bello Cabernet.

Octopus Salad in a Citrus Vinaigrette with Frisee, Fennel and Nicoise Olive

Cooked octopus tentacles can be hard to find but if you have a local Japanese market, you may be in luck! If not, you could easily substitute grilled calamari, sliced into rings before dressing and then tossed into the salad.

Serves 4

For the salad

• 2 cara cara oranges
• ½ head frisee
• 1 medium or 1 small fennel bulbs sliced thin on a Japanese madoline
• ½ cup Nicoise olives, pitted and torn in half

For the dressing

• ½ cup fresh squeezed orange juice
• 2 tablespoons good quality sherry vinegar
• 1 ½ teaspoons stone ground mustard like Maille Rich Country Dijon
• 2 tablespoons almond oil
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

For the octopus

• 2 tentacles octopus
• Olive oil
• Salt
• ½ of a lemon

With a knife, slice the peel off the oranges then with a pairing knife, cut out the individual segments, leaving the pith. Squeeze the juice from the remaining pith and peel and add to the freshly squeezed orange juice. Set the orange segments aside but as juice accumulates, pour into the orange juice. Clean the ½ head of frisee and place in a bowl along with the fennel and olives.

For the vinaigrette, reduce the orange juice along with the accumulated cara cara orange juice until syrupy or until about 3 tablespoons remains. Place into a jar with a tight fitting lid and add the sherry vinegar, mustard, oils and seasoning and shake until emulsified.

Preheat the grill. Take a wooden skewer and thread the tentacles along the skewer to straighten out the octopus arms. Season with olive oil, salt and pepper. Grill the tentacles on each side until nicely grilled. Take off grill and as soon as it is cool enough to handle, slice as thin as you can and place in a small bowl. Season the octopus with a bit more olive oil and a few squirts of lemon. Taste before you add salt.

Dress the salad with a bit of the vinaigrette, you will have left overs. Top with the oranges and warm octopus and toss. Serve immediately.