Grilled Octopus with cider vinegar

Get the freshest octopus you can get. Normally you can get some transported on ice from the Atlantic here in Belgium. 

I first cut off the arms so I get 8 even pieces.

Cooking : If you cook them for just 20 mins, they're still tough as hell. In Spain they knock them soft with a hammer (destroys the connective tissue). But to my experience this is not suited for any gentleman, unless you want to scrape any octopus from your kitchen walls. We're going to cook it for 10 minutes so the arms curl up in boiling water. The water will cool down immediately so I leave it until it turns purple-red and the arms are curled up. (if you use frozen octopus you can skip this phase as the freezing tends to tenderise the meat.) Best is to put the octopus in ice water shortly after.

Put the arms in a sous-vide bag with plenty of olive oil and salt. You could alternatively add garlic, parsley, black pepper, and even some apple cider vinegar (some say this tenderises the meat even more but I haven't seen any difference here). We're now going to cook it for 10 hours. Yes. 10 hours. At a 75°C temperature. I tried to cook it for only 5 hours but that left the arms still very chewy. If you want to cook it to gelatine you can leave it for 24 hours.

First of all, keep the marinade as we'll need it later on.

Here we make incisions in the meat every 1cm. I left my sous-vide bag one night in the fridge, make sure you don't add too much salt as this will enter the meat so it's completely unedible! (as my wife told me). 

If you slice the potatoes very thin with a mandoline (watch out those fingers, always use the slicer-aid-piece or ... you can grab an old towel and use this to protect your fingers) you just need to add a lot of olive oil, some salt and pepper, toss it around and make sure they're all evenly coated. You can then place them in an oven for about an hour at 175°. I cover them with some aluminum foil to prevent them from drying out. The trick is to check every ten minutes after half an hour with a fork (just prick to see if there is still some resistance) to see if they're done all the way. The potatoes will absorb a lot of the olive oil, and therefore never feel quite 'done'. It's also very easy to cut them in a square shape now to plate them properly.

Since we've recovered the marinade from our sous-vide (and 50% of the octopus juices are now mixed with our olive oil), it's time to reduce them a bit to strenghten the flavour. Just put it on a stove and let it simmer for 5 minutes. Now add cider apple vinegar to taste. It can use a bit of sourness with the smoked flavour. I always stabilise the emulsion now with a pinch of xanthan gum. This to make sure the oil and the juices don't separate again in your plate. Just add a pinch of xanthan gum (you could use a starch-water solution but this gives it some bland taste) and mix it.