Bottega - Michael Chiarello [55]
FOR THE POTATOES: Preheat the oven to 300°F. Arrange the potato slices on one or two rimmed baking sheets in a single layer. Season both sides with the salt and pepper. Pour on enough olive oil to reach about one-third up the sides of the potatoes. Turn the potatoes over to coat with the oil. Scatter the thyme and garlic over the potatoes, sprinkle with a little more salt, if desired, and bake until the potatoes are tender, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and let the potatoes cool.
FOR THE ONION: In a medium bowl, toss the onion slices with your fingers to break apart the sec-tions. Add the vinegar, toss again, and let stand for 15 minutes to 1 hour. This is a very quick pickling to just smooth away a little of the onion’s sharpness.
Whisk together the ½ tablespoon olive oil and lemon juice and add the arugula. Toss until lightly coated. Spoon the potatoes onto each of 4 warmed plates and top with a small mound of arugula. Place a few of the tentacle pieces on the greens along with one or two thicker slices of octopus. Scatter pickled red onion over the plate and then drizzle the octopus with the salsa verde and a few drops of olive oil. If you like, pass extra salsa verde in small bowls.
How Far Would You Go for Tender Octopus?
I did a good amount of traveling and cooking to promote Mondavi wines in the 1990s. During one memorable trip, I got to take over a kitchen in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Bangkok for a two-week promotion. The king of Thailand was expected one night, which meant I was practicing all my tricks, preparing for the dinner and especially focusing on cooking tender octopus.
Now, Italians have all kinds of lore for how to make polpo tender: You put a penny in the stock, you put a cork in the pot, you have a Corsican virgin walk around the fire three times clockwise. So there I am with my pennies, my corks, and my Corsican virgin, ready to make the most tender octopus on the block. I cooked my dish, the whole nine-yard, three-hour process, the same way I usually do, and was shocked when my octopus came out overcooked by a mile.
“What’s the deal?” I asked the Thai cooks working with me, but they all smiled inscrutably and went back to their own cooking.
Okay. Roll up the sleeves, make it again, cook it half the time I usually do. Again, it’s overcooked, and still, mum’s the word from the other cooks. So I went to my comis, the apprentice assigned to me by the kitchen, and asked him each and every day for two weeks: “How did you get this octopus so tender?” No answer. Finally, on the last day, he beckoned for me to follow him. We went outside and I climbed up behind him on his tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled scooter, about half the height of my ten-speed at home). For the next twenty minutes all I can hear is REEEEEEEEEE. The tuk-tuk made this high-pitched two-stroke whine all the way to the docks, where we jumped onto a dilapidated, thirty-foot-long, super-skinny boat propelled by my comis and a very long pole. We pulled away from the dock, and after an hour of winding through the sloughs of Bangkok with my ears still ringing from the tuk-tuk ride, I was starting to think I’d been chef-napped. We docked, and he led me to a ramshackle wooden structure with an orange power cord running out the door and along the ground as far as the eye could see. Inside the shack was a beat-up Maytag washing machine, empty of water but tumbling a load of about three dozen octopi. Trust the Thai to tenderize octopus using modern technology.
I came home and, with the help of my local fishmonger, Mikey, tried to set up my own octo-machine using an old washer and a bunch of training baseballs (because they’re heavier than a regular baseball), but the health inspector didn’t go for the idea. So we started from scratch and created our own machine, starting with a brand-new cement