Polpi Freschi

The other day I tried cooking octopus. It was really fun! Its like cooking a giant, stringy wad of jelly.

I stumbled into this because the guy at the fish market was being extremely unhelpful. So instead of picking from a selection of dried-out looking fish, I just asked for a single octopus. If it wouldn't taste good, at least it would make for an interesting story.

So I get it back the the apartment, where everyone is pretty disgusted by it. Somewhere in there, it gets the name "Frank."

So we take Frank to the kitchen, and I clean it and strip the head. It is then a tangle of legs and looking like a very goopy gray blob. The one problem is that I didn't know how to fix octopus. It's not exactly a common fixture in Atlanta's supermarkets.

So I checked out Mark Bittman's article on the subject, and then checked the kitchen stockroom. They didn't exactly match, so I ended up just throwing anything flavorful into a pot of boiling water and wine, and then adding the octopus.

The one rule I did follow from the article was the Italian legend that adding a cork in the pot would make it tender. I figured that would take care of most anything.

So the octopus boiled for an hour and a half (who knew it could stand such treatment!?) and after, the gelatinous blob had turned bright white and purple, had seized up and shrunk in size by half, and had developed a sweet, candy-like fish taste.

I then further cleaned the fat from the legs (octopuses' have a surprisingly dense layer of the stuff) and then tossed the meat with a citrus salad.

A few people tried it, but Steve and I ended up being the only ones to actually have it for dinner. Mmmm... tasty.