Chargrilled Octopus and Orange Salad

I thought I’d try an ingredient I’d never worked with before and enthusiastically picked octopus as without any particular recipe in mind for this post. Having returned from the fish shop, I flipped frantically through my cookbooks for a while without much success. Thank goodness for Google, which yielded this recipe for a salad of char-grilled baby octopus and orange – what did we ever do without it?

This salad has several elements, which makes for a somewhat time-consuming preparation. The octopus has to be cleaned – we chose to keep the heads, but cut them off and cleaned out everything inside prior to cooking. That was a… ahem… rather messy job to be honest, which the valiant husband took on, while I watched a bit queasily from the sidelines. While I’m not generally squeamish when it comes to raw meat or fish, I was quite relieved to pass on the job of gutting the octopus!

I tossed the cleaned octopus with a marinade of chopped lemon, parsley and garlic and popped them in the fridge for a couple of hours. The glaze for the octopus consisted of a sugar and white wine reduction. The recipe called for orange oil, which we didn’t have, so I infused some finely sliced orange rind in the glaze.

The salad base uses a simple mixture of salad leaves and spring onions as a base, and the final element is an orange and tomato salsa which is a concoction of vine-ripened tomato, orange segments, Spanish onion, garlic, flat leaf parsley and extra virgin olive oil.

Once we had all these bits and pieces ready, we barbecued the octopus, which curled up beautifully like miniature sculptures on the hot griddle, the delicate, swirling tentacles charring to golden, caramalised perfection. We dressed the char-grilled octopus with the orange-infused glaze and piled it onto waiting tapas dishes which held the salad base and the salsa.

This salad is lovely and vibrant to look at, and full of interesting flavours and textures to intrigue the palate. There are few flavours as sweetly delicate as char-grilled baby octopus. The orange-infused glaze works beautifully with the octopus, complimenting rather than overpowering the main ingredient. I didn’t expect the salad to be as filling as it was – it made for a lovely light main course rather than an appetizer. All in all, I am pretty chuffed with this successful experiment with a new ingredient.