Tandoori Octopus with Mango Achar Beurre Noisette
Portugal's beloved grilled octopus given the treatment India gives its chicken: a yogurt and spice marinade, a blistering tandoor heat, and a brown butter sauce sharpened with mango pickle. The tentacle you cannot stop looking at, and then cannot stop eating.
- 1 octopus, about 1.5 kg, cleaned
- 1 onion, 1 bay leaf
- For the marinade: 200 g thick yogurt, 2 tablespoons ginger-garlic paste, 2 teaspoons Kashmiri chilli powder, 1 teaspoon garam masala, half a teaspoon turmeric, juice of 1 lime, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon mustard oil
- For the sauce: 100 g butter, 2 tablespoons mango achar, finely chopped, juice of half a lime
- Coriander and lime wedges
- Simmer the octopus with the onion and bay in unsalted water for about 45 minutes until tender. Cool in the liquid, then separate the tentacles.
- Mix the marinade, coat the tentacles thoroughly, cover and refrigerate for at least 8 hours.
- Heat a grill or tandoor as hot as possible. Cook the tentacles 4 minutes per side until the marinade chars in spots.
- Cook the butter in a small pan until it foams and turns hazelnut brown. Off the heat, stir in the chopped achar and lime juice.
- Spoon the sauce onto warm plates, lay the tentacles over, and finish with coriander and lime.
The Portuguese cook octopus better than anyone in Europe, boiling it gently until tender and then finishing it over charcoal with olive oil, garlic and coarse salt. India has almost no tradition of octopus but has perfected the technique of marinating flesh in spiced yogurt and cooking it in the scorching dry heat of a tandoor, where the yogurt chars and the spices bloom. Our kitchen borrowed the Portuguese first step and the Indian second and found that octopus takes to tandoori spicing better than chicken does.
The octopus is simmered with a bay leaf and an onion until a knife slides into the thickest tentacle, then cooled and marinated overnight in a thick yogurt paste of ginger, garlic, Kashmiri chilli, garam masala, turmeric and lime. Cooked in a tandoor or on the hottest grill you can manage, the yogurt sets into a spiced crust that clings to the tentacle's curls. The sauce is a French beurre noisette, butter cooked to hazelnut brown, finished with a spoon of chopped Indian mango achar, the hot sour pickle. Its fenugreek and mustard oil meet the brown butter's nuttiness and the result tastes like a condiment that should have always existed.
Getting the texture right
Everything depends on the first cooking. A 1.5 kilo octopus needs about 45 minutes at a gentle simmer; test it often, because five minutes too many turns it to rubber. Cool it in its own liquid. The marinade needs at least eight hours to season through the thick flesh. On the grill, it needs only four minutes a side: you are charring the crust, not cooking the octopus again.
Serve the tentacles whole over a smear of the sauce, with grilled naan or, in the Portuguese spirit, boiled potatoes crushed with olive oil. A Vinho Verde is the right wine; a cold lager is the right beer.
