How To Make An Octopus Salad

Today, I'm going to show you an authentic Italian recipe. I'm going to show you how to make an Octopus Salad. Here, I've got a beautiful octopus.

I've got four medium potatoes, a bunch of parsley, some pepper and salt, juice - about a tablespoon of lemon juice, one red chilli - depending on the strength of it, half an onion, some carrots and one celery stick and two bay leaves, and about 5 tablespoons of olive oil. First of all, I'm going to start off by boiling the octopus and into the water, I'm going to put a celery stick, this should give it a really good flavour, a carrot for a bit of sweetness & spice. A couple of bay leaves and half an onion, and into the water, I'm going to put this beautiful octopus.

If you dunk it in and out of the water, you'll get this lovely curling of the tentacles. There. So, we'll leave them to cook for about an hour until it's lovely and tender to touch.

I'm also going to boil the potatoes, whole, as they do in Italy with the skins on, I'll put a bit more water in there as well and then we'll peel them later once they cook through. So, we'll come back later. You can tell when it's done if you can pass a knife easily through one of the thickest areas.

So, choose an area somewhere near the head and see if you could pass a knife through easily. And if it's nice and soft to the touch, then you know that your octopus is done. So, I'm going to take it out and drop it into some cool water and that way I can cool it down quicker and peel it.

You could also do it under a tap. So, here, it's ahead of time to cool down a little bit and you can scrape back the skin and scrape back the little suckers off with a knife or you can pull it off with cloth is another way. You'll find quite easily, dismembering comes off from the outside, and once it's clean, you can simply chop off the flesh, into bite size pieces I think is best.

So, if you repeat that with the rest of the legs. I'll also show you the inside here, the middle part of the octopus. You can see how easily the little suckers come off here as well.

Now, some people take out the eyes to begin with, because they say that they can explode in the water. But, I find that does not really necessary to do that. Here's the beak, so I can remove the beak from the octopus, we're not going to eat that, but pretty well all of the rest of it is edible as I say.

Not the eyes or any tough bits that you might find on it, on there. So, here our bite-size pieces of octopus. I quite liked it to actually see the size of the octopus and see to feel it like this.

I'm going to put some chilli in as well, again, you must do that to taste because I have no idea how hot your chillies are. I'm going to put pepper and salt in. And into that, I'd put chopped parsley, too.

A little bit of black pepper and using your hand, just because I want to be quite gentle with the potato, I don't want them to break up too much, so I prefer to use my hands for this. Toss it all together, and of course, taste for seasoning. The octopus is really soft.

For me, it needs a little bit of lemon juice, just to have a bit of zing of lemon in there. Other than that, I think it was just ready to go. So, here, well, I quite like to serve it "ti a ti do" as the Italians would say, at room temperature.

I think you don't want everyone to see food salads to be really, really fridge cold. Just let it come to room temperature and in that way, you'll get all the flavouring out of it, and a bit of red chilli there. So, here we have our Octopus Salad. .