2 creative directors sous vide an octopus

It was Sunday and I had someone take our 4 year old to a carnival so we had several hours to ourselves. Did we watch a movie? Go out to dinner? Take a nap? Take a passionate roll in the sack? No we decided it was the perfect time to experiment with a 6 pound octopus and take pictures of it.

Several months ago we had an amazing octopus carpaccio at a restaurant. They had cooked the octopus in a sous vide and then sliced it very thinly on a plate with some micro greens, lemon and I think paprika. We have been talking about making it ever since.

We ordered a frozen spanish octopus and were expecting to get a 3-4 pounder but what came in the mail was a 6 pound monster that sat in our fridge defrosting for a couple of days.

We roved the internet for a while to find some videos of people breaking down an octopus. Since our was frozen and not fresh we fortunately didn’t need to “clean” it and take all the ink and yucky inner stuff out of it’s head. Yes if you buy a fresh one from a fish monter you will need to slice open it’s head and pull out all the gunk inside. We pulled out Flavio (I named him of course. Doesn’t everyone name their food?) and put him on a cutting board. Eye side up and then we cut out the beak. This is about as appealing as you might think. That little black thing is an actual beak!

We then flipped it over and cut out the eyes. Fortunately I’d made us a batch of my yummy blackberrry gin coolers. It’s a squirt of home made blackberry syrup which I did with some Thyme, lime, gin, mint and club soda. They helped me deal with all the gushy octo parts and the intense fish smell.

After that we cut off the head and cut apart all the tentacles. Once broken down we washed it in the sink and dried it off with a clean towel. Now we were ready to put in our food saver bags and get into the sous vide. We added just salt, lemon and olive oil to some, added oregano to the mix for others and finally did some with paprika, olive oil, lemon and oregano.

We placed them in the sous vide at 165 and checked them in 7 hours and they still were not tender so we left them in overnight! We had intended them to take them out as soon as we got up but our daughter had a melt down and getting her ready for preschool was harder than breaking down the octopus so I completely forgot about it. When I started planning dinner I suddenly remembered we had an octopus that had been in the sous vide for 19 hours and I ran to take it out. It was pink in the bag, nice and tender but amazingly still in tact. The tentacles have shrunk to more than half their size and are now swimming in lots of pink liquid. I popped them in the fridge and later I’ll put some in the freezer for a later date, but that 6 pound octopus looks like it will feed 4-6 for dinner, but as the intended carpaccio it should be enough to make appetizers for 2 to 3 diner parties. We will try some tonight and tomorrow we will make the carpaccio. More pictures coming on my tumbler feed!

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