Call to Arms

Philly chefs do octopus right. Which isn't quite as easy as you'd think.

by Trey Popp

Philadelphia is an octopus town. From the oil-soaked suckers at Dmitri's to the charred baby octopus at Ansill, local chefs know what they're doing with cephalopods. And considering the wealth of marine life on sale between Reading Terminal and the Chinatown fish markets on North 10th Street, buying them is a snap. As low in fat as they are high in protein — 6 cooked ounces fill out your daily recommended intake — octopuses are the kind of sea creatures you can feel good about bringing home. They breed like rabbits and aren't overfished, and despite their carnivorous ways, they aren't mercury bombs.

EIGHT LEGGED FREAK: The author's cephalopod submerged and subdued. : Trey Popp

Cooking them turns out to be a tad more complicated. The cute little tentacles you remember from your last dinner out were probably a lot longer to begin with. Washing my specimen's sucker-studded arms was a little like shampooing a woman's waist-length hair.

Then there's the issue of tenderizing the meat. Italians beat the animals against rocks at the seaside — an idea that doesn't go far in a house full of drywall. The Japanese method, I had read, was to pound the arms into submission with a daikon radish. Now I do not believe killing an octopus for food is immoral, but pummeling a once-fearsome hunter with a garden vegetable seemed like it might be.

So I did as my recipe instructed: "Grab the octopus by the head and dunk it three times just below the head (without scalding yourself!) in the boiling water." This preserved the pot temperature long enough to shock the tentacles into curling up into tight spirals. Then I dropped the whole thing into the broth along with a shiny penny (for color) and left it for an hour and a half.

Had I talked to chef Pippo Lamberti before my first cooking attempt, I would have saved myself time and ended up with a slightly less slimy appetizer. Lamberti, of Center City's Positano Coast, is a big fan of high heat and minimal cooking times. He also uses fresh baby octopuses from Portugal that would have embarrassed my West Pacific specimen in a beauty contest. By tossing them into a glorified KitchenAid mixer with ice water and salt, he gets the arms tender and curled enough that cooking takes only a matter of minutes. Blanched and then charred over flames, his octopuses' pink-purple tentacles make for a clean, simple and very fresh taste atop a tuft of baby salad greens.

An hour and a half in hot water has a powerful effect on a 2-pound-plus octopus. It's a good thing I had half a dozen other small plates planned for dinner, because the long, stringy tentacles I had lowered into the pot were no more. Now they were stout little curls shorter than my index finger. The whole animal could have fit into my palm.

Had I served it as "baby octopus," no one would have been the wiser.

In the restaurant world, baby octopuses can either be fully grown pygmy octopuses or true juveniles. Diners who object to eating young animals may be tempted to make an exception for creatures with eight arms, but they should bear in mind that at least two species of octopus have been observed "walking" upright on the sea floor, using two limbs like tank treads while assembling the other six into a disguise. Sounds smart, right? Octopuses — not the erroneous "octopi," which tries to cram a Latin case ending onto a Greek root — are considered intelligent enough to merit inclusion on the list of experimental animals on which surgery may not be performed without anesthesia. One piece of evidence: They can learn to open jars by watching humans do it.

Plated with potatoes, doused with olive oil and sprinkled with sweet pimenton, the first octopus to pass through my kitchen tasted good but had a slightly gelatinous character that Philly's better chefs avoid. At least the copper in that penny gave it a handsome reddish tinge that one doesn't find around town. Considering the layer of crusted slime the octopus left on that penny, however, I'll do everyone a favor and make sure no one sees that around town either.

(trey.popp@citypaper.net)