Dgourmac's Blog

Some of my loyal readers are repelled by the idea of eating octopus, and others may simply be tired of the many times I post about it. If you are in either category, my apologies. Please just move on to the next posting.

The methodology this time was the same as my entry, Octopus 5.0, described here two years ago. It’s a combination of food-scientist-writer, Harold McGee’s simple poaching process, followed by Jesse Schenker’s overnight marinating bath in citrus-infused olive oil with herbs. Below are some of the prep steps, showing the oil bath, chopped herbs and garlic, Sicilian sea salt, and Calabrian chili peppers.

This was a 4.5 lb. Spanish octopus, purchased frozen from Portugalia. One of the joys of this food is the number of delicious meals I can make from it. This week’s list included:

• Pulpo alla Gallega
• grilled octopus with roasted Portobello mushrooms
• octopus with grilled radicchio
• grilled octopus with King City Pinks beans (Ranch Gordo) and more Radicchio di Treviso
• octopus with potatoes and arugula
• octopus with sweet onions and potatoes

You can quickly browse through the dishes shown below. The one new technique that I learned was McGee’s description of concentrating the juices released in the poaching process. There was a quart of intensely-rich flavored juice in the pot when it was done cooking for 5 hours at 200° F., all of it from the octopus which started in a dry pot. Those juices were boiled down considerably to produce an even more intense sauce, which greatly enhanced the octopus and beans dish, enough so that a full-bodied red wine was the right accompaniment.

Another very Italian dish in this mini-series is Pasta alla Gricia. The name rolls tripplingly off the tongue in Italian, less so in English as “pasta gray”. I was led to research and then make this dish because of “guanciale” (cured pork jowl). I had finally tried guanciale properly about a month ago, when making an authentic version of Pasta Amatricana, and I decided I really do like it at least as much as pancetta.

The recipe for alla Gricia is pretty simple:

Rather than duplicate the details here, I refer you to an excellent article by Sasha Marx on Serious Eats.

Here’s what the dish looked like when done. Quite delicious. A Godello from Spain was a good match.

Usually when I cook, I start with a recipe, either something I’ve made before, or a new one I want to try. Yesterday was different. I decided to create a new risotto dish from some items I had in mind, thinking that they might make an especially good meal in combination together. The specific ingredients were:

• zucchini – I had 3 available, but one in particular was beginning to shrivel and had to be used immediately
• leeks – I had two large ones and two small segments, so I grabbed the small ones to use
• shrimp – We always have a bag of EZ-Peel small shrimp in the freezer. They are frozen individually, so it’s easy to defrost precisely the number I want. I decided on 8 for a balanced dish with the vegetables, BUT when I left the kitchen for a few minutes, the other chef (my wife) decided that was too skimpy, so she doubled the quantity while I wasn’t looking.
• morel mushrooms – shopping Sunday at Eataly Boston, I found some gorgeous fresh mushrooms (chanterelles and morels). Since I had never cooked morels, I bought just two of them, to give them a try with this dish.

I had an image in my mind of a umami-rich bowl of rice cooked gently over an extended time period with these ingredients, all merged together with the broth and the fats of risotto. Remarkably, it worked.

You’ll notice a few whole shrimp on top, which is how I dealt with the surfeit of shrimp which came my way suddenly.

Here are all the details, should you be tempted to try it. It was one of the best risotti I ever had.

If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I would be in Campania, Italy, along the Amalfi Coast. Since that’s a pipe dream at the moment, I decided instead to make myself what I imagine would be a creative Southern Italian lunch. In fact, this entry will be the first of four successive food and wine posts with an Italian flavor, starting with the most recent (today).

It begins with a single salt-packed anchovy from Cetara. It was removed from the briny jar, carefully rinsed and de-salted, made into two small fillets, and then placed gently in a skillet with olive oil and hot pepper flakes, on a very low flame. After about 5 minutes in the warm oil, the anchovy dissolved, and it provided a flavorful base for the dish. Mostly made from leftovers, here were the ingredients.

The rapini, (a/k/a) broccoli rabe, had been trimmed, blanched, and chopped a few days ago, when I was using the rapini blanching liquid to make a light broth for risotto. The torchietti was a new find, at Trader Joe’s last week during a shopping trip. Roasted garlic? Cooked in the oven last week and preserved in olive oil. Salami and Castelvetrano olives? Bought yesteday at Eataly Boston. Plum tomato? About to go bad, sitting on the kitchen counter, so it had to be quickly blanched, skinned and seeded for whatever was looking for a little acid. And the Falanghina was a wine from the Mucci brothers, imported from one of their producers in Campania, purchased yesterday at Social Wines. The olive oil was from Sardinia, a full flavored recent vintage from Gustiamo, a favorite supplier of all things Italian.

It came together beautifully, and I finished all in three portions for my lunch.