Texture cuisine – 

the octopus challenge

Some foods are as much about texture as flavour, and there is no better example than cooked octopus. Unfortunately it is still a rare feature on Kiwi menus. 

Marinated octopus offerings are plentiful in Australia and cuisine tourists cannot visit Melbourne without a munching tour of the expansive Queen Vic Markets in the northern CBD, and the largest open air market in the Southern hemisphere. 

Greek, Italian and Spanish cuisine influences are strong across the ditch and are plentiful in this market, which has been around since the 1850s in various reincarnations. It is one of three surviving Victorian markets in Melbourne - the others are the Prahran Market and South Melbourne Market. 

The meat, poultry, seafood, gourmet and deli food outlets are housed in the beautiful old buildings to the east of the market where Foodstyle Review hunted down a delicacy endemic to many of the seafood outlets in this great cuisine tourism food hall – marinated octopus. Marine cousins squid and octopus share the same flesh and ‘texture cuisine’, in that the bite and chew qualities are as important as the flavour. 

While squid has been common on Kiwi menus since the early 1980s, octopus has been ignored, apart from the odd presence of frozen baby octopus imported from Asia that, like squid, is grilled very quickly. 

Large octopus, on the other hand, when you can find them for sale, is not only expensive, but messy to dress and laborious to cook, as we found out. Like squid, octopus does not suffer from being frozen and even makes it tenderer. And the general rule is marinate baby octopus before cooking and cook large octopus before marinating. 

The cheapest octopus we found in the Queen City was in Onehunga, from a Polynesian fish shop that was selling it at $9 a kilo, undressed. Be warned, dressing fresh octopus is not a sight for the kids or the faint hearted and involves wrestling a slippery octopus on a chopping board, lopping it in half under the eyes, cutting out the beak and gutting the messy head. There are also various pre-cooking ‘tenderising’ techniques that involve violence to the carcass by beating it against a hard surface, dipping it into boiling water three times, or, strangely, even boiling it with corks. 

We explored online for a ‘consensus’ on octopus cooking and have to say we couldn’t find one that didn’t tell us to simply boil the heck out of it. Which is exactly what we did to our first smallish 1.5 kilogram octopus, plunging it into boiling seasoned water three times then turning down the heat and let it simmer (we lightly salted the water and seasoned it with a bay leaf, whole peppercorns, coarsely sliced onion, dash of white wine, thyme, laurel, rosemary, crushed garlic, and lemon wedges. The octopus must be completely covered with water while cooking.

Octopus shrinks, and after two hours in hot water our poor beast had shrunk to the point that we thought it had escaped from the pot. After two hours we fished it out of the murky pot and washed what remained under cold water. The skin and suckers slipped off the tentacles. We have been told an old rule with cooking whole octopus is 30 minutes per kilo so we should have cooked it for no more than 40 minutes. You can keep testing it by sticking a skewer into the thickest part – in the same way you test boiled potatoes for ‘resistance’. 

However, waste not, we marinated what was left of our cooked octopus overnight in an Asian marinade of oil, sweet chili sauce, ginger and coriander and prepared it the next day with a little rocket salad (photo). It actually tasted OK, if not a bit too chewy, but there had to be a better method. 

The second octopus we bought from our new friends in Onehunga was a little bigger – two kilos. We gave it to Jeremy Schmid at Two Fifteen Restaurant in Mt Eden, who features in our summer chef profile, after he expressed an interest in the project. His kitchen features one of those clever commercial ‘boil in the bag’, slow-cooking, commercial poaching machines called an Immersion Circulator, and a commercial deep fryer of the sort which snap fries crusted squid pieces crispy tender. 

“Well, that didn’t work,” said Jeremy after trying a few pieces of raw octopus in the deep fryer. “It was tough as old boots.” 

Jeremy then turned to the restaurant’s wonderfully sounding immersion circulator, designed for the modern French sous vide (under a vacuum) method of slowly simmering food in a vacuum sealed, airless bag that is submerged in a low temperature (precisely controlled) water bath. One of the few cooking books on this, still experimental, method is by Thomas Keller from the French Laundry in northern California (his ex pastry chef featured in the spring 2009 issue of Foodstyle Review). His cookbook Under Pressure comprehensively explores sous vide precision-cooking technique but be warned – it is designed for professionals. 

Jeremy followed Keller’s ‘Grilled Octopus Tentacles, Chorizo, Fingerling Potatoes, Green Almonds, and Salsa Verde,’ recipe which involves arduous cleaning and trimming of the octopus head and tentacles before it is sealed with herbs and olive oil in a plastic bag and submerged for five hours at a low 77 degrees C (171 degrees F).

The result was far, far tenderer than the first ‘boiled’ octopus effort. And sealed in an air tight bag, the flavours couldn’t be leached out so the thick, firm flesh had a saltier and stronger seafood flavour. 

“This is an ideal use of sous vide cooking and I believe it is the best way to cook octopus,” says Jeremy who adds that he may experiment a little further. “The problem is the labour intensity in the preparation.” 

After his staff indulged in a tasting of the Keller recipe, there was enough of the cooked sous vide octopus left for Foodstyle to marinate in traditional Italian flavours – red wine vinaigrette, garlic, oregano, cracked pepper, and a little lemon juice and zest, and leave it to marinate in the fridge overnight. It was presented with Italian greens and fresh Italian parsley. Not bad at all and a start on filling up the dearth of octopus recipes in New Zealand recipe books! 

Summer 2009

One of the few outlets serving marinated octopus in Auckland is Fishmart at the huge Auckland Fish Market complex.	The immersion circulator machine at Two Fifteen restaurant – for low temperature cooking in a heated water bath.

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