Name: Grilled Octopus with Garlic Chives and Fingerling Potato Salad
Yield: Serves 4
Ingredients: Salt and black pepper; 2 lengthwise slices red onion; Rice wine vinegar; Salt; 1 small octopus, cleaned; 1 small purple potato, finely diced, cooked, and cooled (optional); About 28 garlic chive buds, hard bottoms removed, or green garlic or garlic scapes (optional); Salt and black pepper to taste; 2 teaspoons mustard; 2 tablespoons lemon juice; 1 clove garlic, smashed to a paste; 1 cup fingerling potatoes cut on a mandoline into rounds; 1 tablespoon olive oil; 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Complex

Appears in

Cooking without Borders

By Anita Lo

Published 2011

About

I’ve tried all the tricks that anyone has ever suggested to make octopus tender. There’s the one about cooking the tentacles with a wine cork; another insists there has to be a little vinegar in the water. Traditionally, recipes call for long periods of pounding against a hard, rough stone, as it’s done in Greece. The cork, in my experiment at least, didn’t do anything. Neither did the vinegar, except to impart a little of that flavor. And the pounding—unless I did it incorrectly—resulted i