For all but the most experienced or merely cavalier among us, octopus can be pretty tricky to make at home. Whether you’re grilling, sauteing, or giving your mollusk the sous vide treatment, it always seems like there’s some tip, trick, or incantation that needs to be performed totally separate from the main recipe. Even celebrity chef Bobby Flay has one and, unlike the inexpensive cut of steak he recommends for feeding a crowd (skirt steak), or the go-to secret ingredient that Flay keeps in his pantry (anchovies), this particular seafood solution is absent much apparent culinary common sense: He cooks his octopus with wine corks to supposedly stave off toughness.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it,” Flay says in response to a viewer’s question about how he prepares the protein in a Food Network Facebook Live video. “It might be an old Greek wives’ tale, but I’ve been doing it for 20 years this way and my octopus is always tender,” he says. “We save the wine corks and we put it in the braising liquid with the octopus, and they say there’s an enzyme that makes it tender.” Lest this come off as social media bluster, there are, indeed, Bobby Flay recipes in circulation that call for a handful of corks per octopus braise.
Extending your tentacles into Flay’s octopus-making ways (and some more proven techniques)
In a long-ago live cooking demonstration for Food & Wine, where Bobby Flay is seen simmering corks, he also swears that precisely 10 whacks of the octopus against the hard surface of your kitchen sink will help to aid tenderization (via YouTube). While the particular count is a bit dubious, a similar few rounds of pounds with a kitchen mallet is a broadly accepted technique for breaking down fibers for a softer finish.
Low and slow heat, whichever preparation you’re applying it to, is an even more conventional method for achieving tender octopus. Some home cooks also swear by freezing octopus to break its fibers down a bit, which will, indeed, occur, as its interior water expands into ice crystals. In either case, the celebrity chef’s borrowed Greek wives’ method practice is all but confirmed not to hurt, at least, or he wouldn’t be extolling its virtues all over the internet. But tried and true instructions like the one ingredient Flay includes for perfect scrambled eggs (creme fraiche) might be a little more applicable to the everyday. Or, you can throw a little octopus in there, too, and have your own quirky tip to share.
