Octopus salad with potatoes Recipe

Octopus salad with potatoes

Octopus salad with potatoes is a classic of our cuisine. An appetizing, nutritious and at the same time light dish to be enjoyed as an appetizer or second course. The recipe is easy and the secret to its success lies in the cooking of the ingredients and the balance of flavors.

Octopus salad with potatoes is a tasty and easy dish to make by following a few precautions: the octopus and potatoes are boiled separately and dressed with a parsley citronette. In this way it becomes an appetizing hors d’oeuvre or a second seafood dish.

The preparation requires those little attentions that make the result perfect and the dish delicious. The secret to obtaining a very tender octopus lies in slow, gentle cooking: we recommend double cooking and cooling in water. A useful tip is to freeze the octopus very fresh before eating it, in this way you will obtain a sort of maturation of its meat.

Octopus is a tasty mollusk which provides good proteins and a low content of fats, therefore calories: an ideal food for those who love to eat in a healthy way. Provided with eight tentacles, octopus can be divided into true octopus, or rock octopus, which has two rows of suckers on each tentacle and sand octopus which lives in open sea and has only one row. True octopus is tastier and therefore more valuable.

Thanks to its characteristics octopus is very versatile, as seen it is excellent simply boiled and in salads, and it is delicious in preparations such as Octopus in stew or Chickpea and Octopus Soup. Exquisite is also another classic first course of our cooking, Spaghetti with octopus sauce.

INGREDIENTS For OCTOPUS SALAD WITH POTATOES

• 1 kg octopus
• 1 kg of potatoes
• 160 g of extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 lemon
• 20 g of fresh parsley
• salt
• pepper

HOW TO PREPARE: OCTOPUS SALAD WITH POTATOES

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To make the octopus salad with potatoes, start by cleaning the octopus (if you have not purchased it already cleaned) removing the eyes, ink sac and bone. Rinse it very well under running water. Bring a pot of water to a boil.

Once it comes to a boil, take the octopus by the head, plunge the tentacles into the boiling water for a few seconds and then pull the octopus back up. Repeat this operation three times. In this way the tentacles will curl up. Place the octopus on a plate.

Rinse the pot, cool it, fill it with cold water and add a teaspoon of salt. Dip the octopus with the tentacles up and the body down: the whole octopus should be completely submerged in the water. Bring to a boil then cover with a lid and allow 20 minutes for cooking. With octopuses weighing less than one kilo (600/700 grams), 10 are sufficient.

Turn off the heat and, keeping the pot covered, continue cooking the octopus in the hot water. Turn the octopus from time to time (but not too often, otherwise you risk losing the heat by continuously lifting the lid) and check its tenderness with the prongs of a fork.

To obtain a soft octopus it will take about 50 minutes. Once cooked, let it cool in its water and then transfer it to a bowl or cutting board.

In the meantime peel the potatoes, rinse them and cut them into cubes of about 2 cm. Boil them in plenty of salted water for about 20 minutes, they should be firm without flaking. Drain them and leave them to cool on a plate, quite far apart.

When the octopus is cold, cut it into pieces similar in size to potato cubes.

Then make the citronette: emulsify the oil, chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper in a bowl with a fork or a small whisk.

In a fairly large salad bowl, combine the octopus and potatoes, add the citronette and mix very gently until the dressing is evenly distributed.

Let it rest for a couple of hours in the refrigerator before serving. Ideally, it should be kept cool overnight. Serve the octopus salad with potatoes at room temperature.

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