What do you get when you combine Italy, wine, and a seaside view? Polpo con patate!
MM and I found this dish on our first adventurous trip to Sorrento, Italy. When he found a very particular ingredient at our nearby grocery store, it was fate – we had to find a recipe and try it out ourselves!
Polpo con Patate
Ingredients
- 2 lbs octopus, cleaned, fresh or frozen
- 2 medium/large yukon gold potatoes, scrubbed
- 1/4 c extra virgin olive oil, divided
- 1/2 c dry white wine
- Juice of 1 lemon
- Salt and ground pepper (to taste)
When it comes to cleaning, you’ll want to make sure its head is completely empty its eyes are removed, as well as its beak. YouTube is a huge help here – use it!
Directions
1. Place the potatoes whole and unpeeled in a pot of cold water and bring to a boil. Cook until tender, about 20 minutes, then drain. Let cool before peeling and slicing into 1/2 slices (you could also cube them into 1/2 inch pieces). Set aside.
2. Heat a Dutch oven over high heat. Add half of the olive oil and place the whole octopus into the pot. Brown it all over, about 2 minutes on top and bottom. Pour the white wine over the octopus and cover. Turn the heat down to the lowest setting, and let simmer 45 minutes (it needs to be very tender – poke it with a fork, especially close to where the tentacles meat in the middle. Cook a few more minutes if that area is not tender). Let the octopus cool in the pot until it is tepid.
3. Remove the octopus from the Dutch oven and drain on paper towels (do not discard the liquid – it’s yummy!). When cool enough to handle, peel off the skin by rubbing it gently with your fingers. Chop into 1 inch pieces.
4. Toss the octopus pieces with the potatoes, lemon juice, remaining olive oil, and one or two spoonfuls of the pan juices. Taste and adjust seasoning. Eat at room temperature or chilled.
MM came home from the grocery store one day with an excited look on his face. “You’ll never guess what I saw in the seafood case today! If you’re up for an adventure, I have an idea!”
I’ll be honest with you – this was a recipe I had never, in my wildest dreams, considered making in my own house. It seemed out of the realm of possibility! But, we were both really looking forward to trying out new recipes during our stay-cation, and this was one hell of an adventure to embark upon…
The potatoes part is pretty easy, though peeling them after they’ve been cooked is a little irritating. Still, easy way to build confidence.
The package of octopus was relatively unassuming. Once I opened it, though, I started to waver in my confidence.
MM, in the kitchen for all the fun, asked me if I wanted to look up how to clean an octopus, I think mainly because he wanted to get his hands on the thing. I very eagerly handed the control of the animal over to him, grabbed my phone, and started searching.
About the time that I glanced up, MM had reached into the packaging and lifted the octopus out and straight up. I freaked out, and nope’d right out of the kitchen, leaving him on his own to find a cutting board to put it on.
I was not a good team player… 🙂
Find a cutting board, he did, and placed the cephalopod in a way to produce this really cool picture:
By the way, that’s our largest cutting board, and that knife is around 7.5-8 inches in length.
I’m not going to lie – it’s still pretty creepy. But I had a job to do! Find out what needed to happen to make sure we could eat the thing. Turns out, when the octopus was prepared to be frozen, they removed everything inside the head – that meant we only had to worry about the eyes (those black things near the middle of the picture), and the beak (not shown in the above picture – it’s on the underside, where the legs connect). Both are relatively easy to remove – took MM about 3 minutes, since I was still on the far side of the kitchen at this point.
At this point, we continued through the instructions, which meant browning the octopus in the pot, and leaving it to simmer.
MM got the fantastic job of carving after it was cooked – we went with the original suggestion of 2 inch pieces, but once we started eating, we determined that smaller pieces were easier to eat. In addition, after reading up online, there was a suggestion that it wasn’t necessary to remove the skin. We were anxious, so we didn’t remove the skin. We’ll change that in the future. Neither of us really enjoyed the texture of the skin.
All told, it tasted exactly like we remembered! It was pretty easy, once I got past the ick factor, and I think we’ll be trying it again in the near future. As soon as we find it in the grocery store again, I think we’ll be picking it up for some more fun.
If nothing else, it was quite the adventure to end our European Stay-cation – and one heck of a story that we brought back to friends and family!