My Grilled Octopus

I just came back from a week in Portugal. Needless to say, I had a lot of seafood. I love octopus. Coming home, I found in my freezer a packages of octopus. Yeah 4 years old, but no freezer burn or anything. I took it out and put it in the fridge to completely defrost. It ended up being 4 baby octopuses. Surfing the net and asking a friend I came up with something.
The consistent message on the internet is, octopus need to be cooked before it goes on a grill. And cook time can be 1-2 hours depending on the size.
My recipe:

  • water (make sure the octous is covered by about 1" of water) was 6 cups for me
  • 1 medium onion coursely chopped
  • 3/4 tsp of salt
  • 3/4 tsp of ground Allspice, I wanted to use kernels, but I only had ground Allspice. 
  • 8 juniper berries
  • 3 Bay leafes
  • 1 black cardamon kernel
Rinse the octopus and dry it a bit with a paper towel. Add all the items into a pot, add the octopus, bring to a boil, turn down the heat and simmer for about 1.5h. 
Life throws sometimes a curve ball. Finishing all of this had to wait till the next day. The octopus ended up cooling down and in the fridge.
The next day: Side 1: baked potatoes. Peel and slice potatoes in 1/3" slices. Cover with olive oil (freshly imported from Portugal from a colleague's family) with a bit of salt and pepper. Bake for about 20 min.
The grill outdoors was not in a cards, but the cast iron grill pan was. I added some oil to it. On the stove I tried to get some grill marks. Was not to successful, but the taste from cooking the octopus was great. 
I cheated with the pea's. This is a can heated up. 
Overall, it was still very tasty. I will have that again. May be with a different variation.

2025-03-15
-Mahlzeit-

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