OCTOPUS CONFIT
"Ink" Tahini | Glacier Lettuce | Basque Pepper Curls | Toasted Sesame Oil Powder | Lemon | Olive Oil

This course started out as BABY OCTOPUS | "Ink" Tahini | Lemon | Kalamata. I'd been toying with the idea for a while, and have literally had fresh baby octopus on standing order at SF Fish Company for months, to no avail.

The "ink" tahini spurred the initial idea. Tahini is a made from white sesame seeds. It lends its name to a sauce with the paste as its primary ingredient (typically mixed with lemon juice, water, and perhaps garlic and some spices). Here I've made an "ink" tahini by simply substituting black sesame seeds. I ground them to a paste using a blender (and it broke my blender--I had to finish prep using a neighbor's blender), then laboriously pushed the paste through a chinois, making it really smooth and creamy. Yet another situation where a Vita-Prep would have made my life easier.

The pepper curls were basque peppers from Happy Quail Farms, julienned then dehydrated until crunchy. The powdered toasted sesame oil was tapioca maltodextrin with olive oil, sesame oil, and salt. The olive oil balanced it out. Plain sesame oil powder was too intense. I got the glacier lettuce through Far West Fungi, and I know nothing about its provenance. It's a very succulent lettuce that tastes very much like sorrel but is crisp and crunchy and seems to burst in your mouth.

The adult octopus was a Japanese octopus from Tokyo Market in Berkeley. The baby octopi were from Berkeley Bowl (and were frozen). In both cases, I cut off the heads just below the beaks, and scrubbed the tentacles with salt to remove any slime. Then I bagged them with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and cooked them 5 hours at 77C (170.6F) per Thomas Keller's method in Under Pressure. Then I took them out and let them cool slightly and then scraped off the suckers and skin. I reserved them in their own cooking juices (they give off a ton of juice and shrink a lot when cooking). At service, they were reheated in their juices, then drained on paper towels before plating.

Posted by Barzelay on 2009/09/23 @ 2:00 | Comments (3) | Food Additives, Lazy Bear, Seafood, Veggies, Fruit, Grain, Cheese

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