Cork, Rocks and Vinegar: How (Not) to Cook an Octopus

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So you can break down a chicken, truss a duck and french a rack of lamb? Have you tried cooking an octopus?

There are some dishes which are so failure-prone that a vibrant mythology is built around how to avoid the usual pitfalls. Tenderizing octopus certainly falls into that camp. A quick Google search on the subject quickly reveals that the best way to cook a tender octopus is to vigorously beat it on some Grecian rocks. Or to cook it with wine corks in the pot. Or to add some vinegar. Or maybe the secret is to rub the octopus with grated daikon radish. Actually, scratch all that, the real key to success is to slowly dip the octopus a few seconds at a time into hot water until it acclimates to the boiling temperatures. All of these methods have their proponents, who will wholeheartedly assure you that it will work because after all, that is how their grandfather did it, and his father and his before that.

Since I lack heritage knowledge in octopus cookery, I turned to the next best option: esteemed chef and food scientist Harold McGee. In this article, he admits that his own results with octopus have been inconsistent—sometimes chewy, sometimes fibrous—and proceeds to test all of the usual methods for tenderizing octopus. The result? None of them seemed to be foolproof.
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Inside Tsukiji: Our Last Wild Urban Market

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Turret trucks careening around corners, workers unloading boxes of glistening scales and tentacles, tuna carvers wielding samurai swords. All happening while Tokyo sleeps.

Tsukiji Market holds a storied place among international visitors and chefs in Tokyo. It is the world’s largest wholesale seafood market, sprawling across 23 hectares or about 55 American football fields. Over 2,000 tons of product moves through these stalls every day, ranging from tiny anchovies and smelt to hulking tunas and cuts of whale.

In recent years, the frozen bluefin tuna auction has become a popular attraction for tourists, drawing large crowds who have sometimes been disruptive. In response, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) banned the admittance of visitors for a while, then settled on allowing the first 120 people to view the auction from a designated area. Visitors are admitted beginning at 5 am, and people start lining up even earlier than that.

But don’t go to Tsukiji just to wait in line for the frozen tuna auction; there’s plenty of other sights and stories to learn. I was lucky to come across Naoto Nakamura, a tour guide who worked in the seafood industry for 12 years and may well be Tokyo’s leading expert on the market’s history. At 3 am, we gathered just outside of the market and Nakamura-san explained the ground rules: no photographs with flash, no standing in heavily trafficked areas, and if TMG security guards approach, simply say that you’re shopping and move if asked.
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How to Build a Restaurant Empire

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So you’ve created a wildly successful restaurant, and you’re just beginning to have some semblance of stability and free time again. Is it time to expand and build another location? At last night’s Culintro panel on restaurant expansion, three prominent chefs tackled that question and more. Danny Bowien (Mission Chinese), Andy Ricker (Pok Pok) and Michael White (Marea, Ai Fiori, Osteria Morini, Nicoletta) collectively shared their insights and mused on why anyone would decide to “go do the hardest thing in the world—open a restaurant in New York.”

After all, opening and running a restaurant is asking for unexpected kinks and surprises every day. “You wake up in the morning wondering if today is the day you get your ass handed to you,” Ricker noted wryly. “The job is basically problem solving. It’s being able to grasp a whole lot of things happening at once.” That global vision is what makes a chef and restauranteur. “It’s not just cooking—you’ve got to know about electricity, basic engineering, and when something breaks, you can’t call someone because he’ll come three hours later and you need it fixed now.” Bowien agreed and offered some optimism: “All the challenges—if you can just power through them, it’ll work out. When we were getting reviewed by the New York Times, I was flying back from Copenhagen, and just after I landed, someone texted to say the New York Times is here…and so is the health department. I was having a heart attack! But you just have to power through it all.”

So when do you know it’s time to expand? Most people don’t set out to build restaurant empires, but it becomes clear when the timing is right to grow. “When your restaurant is very successful, you have a sort of political capital, and you either spend it or you don’t—you sh*t or get off the pot,” said Ricker. “You reach a point where you have ideas that don’t fit in the current template. If there’s interest and political capital, the door just opens up.” Over the course of the evening, Ricker, Bowien and White batted ideas and shared the following lessons for aspiring chefs and restauranteurs (or any entrepreneur):
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Return to Ithaca: 5-Year Nonreunion Edition

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About five years ago, I graduated from Cornell. I picked up my diploma from the economics department, took another walk around the Arts Quad, and drove 4.5 hours back to MA with stinging eyes. My undergrad days were over, I was cast out into the cruel Real World, and nothing would ever be the same.

But you know what they forgot to tell you in college? Life is even more awesome AFTER college. After spending Labor Day weekend at Cornell, I can confidently say I have no desire to go back to my college days.

One major change: you’re no longer stuck on a student budget. Now, I was never eating ramen for meals (unless I wanted to) or really strapped for cash (thank you slightly-above-minimum-wage chimesmaster salary), but I did have to be pretty conscientious about money. I still am, but having worked for a few years now and become accustomed to New York-level prices, many things in Ithaca that once seemed luxurious are now quite affordable. $9 cocktails at Stella’s? You can easily pay double that in Manhattan. Appetizers, drinks and an entree at Maxie’s? I used to limit myself to just a po’ boy because I was a um, po’ girl. Shortline Bus for $107 or the snazzy new roomy, wifi-enabled Campus-to-Campus bus for $160? You get free snacks and drinks on the latter; the choice is clear.
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The NYC Food Film Festival, or How I Legally Yanked Food from a Truck

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Gastrocinephiles! So you’ve watched and rewound the opening scene of Eat Drink Man Woman multiple times? Your dreams involve recreating the timpano from Big Night? Then the NYC Food Film Festival is the place to be, celebrating the year’s accomplishments in food film, food documentary, and of course, food porn. In its fifth year of running, the Food Film Fest is attracting all sorts of attention from food media, filmmakers, and even Mayor Bloomberg, who kicked off the opening ceremony by declaring “Food Film Fest Day” in New York.

I was present for the closing gala, themed “Farm to Film to Table.” Held in the Varick Room at the Tribeca Theater, the city’s student filmmakers, publicists and chefs gathered for hors d’oeuvres and cocktails made from locally sourced ingredients. Chef and Food Network star Amanda Freitag spearheaded a menu of baked crab apples with pork belly in the core, butternut squash with curry and pepitas, and roasted sunchokes with red garlic. Most interesting was the edible dirt, a powdery concoction of mushrooms served with peppery arugula. The dirt, while tasty, would’ve been better if it were warm, so I actually ended up sprinkling some over a bowl of chili for highly satisfactory results. Continue reading The NYC Food Film Festival, or How I Legally Yanked Food from a Truck →

An Employment Epistle

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Dear R.,

It has only been six weeks since that napkin-crumpling, tear-stained breakfast with you at the Z-7 Diner, but it feels like years have passed. My job was on tenterhooks; I needed to find a new one or soon join the swelling ranks of the unemployed. Murmurs of a double dip recession were getting louder. I had so many questions and too little time. What do you do with a gastronomy degree anyway? Why is it that the sustainable, “socially responsible” organizations are the ones offering only unpaid internships? How do I land a new apartment lease in the highly competitive NYC real estate market if I can’t demonstrate an income? I am a fighter, yes, but this city is one who fights back. And I was determined to go down in a Viking pyre of glory.

So I started reaching out for help. I talked to old friends’ drinking buddies, lingered to chat with the cheesemonger, shook hands at conferences. I cyberstalked people whose jobs I wanted in ten years and wheedled them into grabbing coffee with me. I emailed you on a whim because—I don’t know—it seemed like you’d made some valuable mistakes before, and you weren’t hesitant to talk about them.

Most of all, I talked to myself. I said that I wanted to write. You asked one innocent yet oh-so-probing question that morning that stuck with me: why should anyone read what I have to say? How do I gain credibility as a writer? After all, you don’t have to bill yourself as a writer to be one. Dan Barber’s platform is his role as chef-owner of Blue Hill; Marion Nestle is a professor at NYU. I let that one marinate, as I searched for roles that would give me a soapbox.

Along the way, I made some incredibly naive mistakes. There was the time I asked a teacher if he would serve as a reference for me. He flatly turned me down. After all, I’d written a publicly critical blog post about the university that he served. There was the time I got rejected for an interview with a publicity agency. Though they were impressed by my cover letter, after Googling me, they’d stumbled across the aforementioned blog post and decided I was too risky a prospect—what if I decided to “write an angry tirade” about them? It turns out that being a writer with opinions is perceived as a threat. For the first time, people were paying attention to what I had to say, and I didn’t want them to.

Things happen in stochastic ways. Maddening weeks went by, as I sent out dozens of resumes into a void of silence. I kept rewriting my cover letter. I applied for unpaid internships and jobs that I was overqualified for. They never replied. I considered going back to economics research. Finally, I sent in an application to work as a sales representative at W&T Seafood, a second generation seafood distributor in Brooklyn. When I met the manager, we hit it off with the immediate chemistry that children born of immigrant entrepreneurs share.

She thought I was smart and would fit into the company handily. The problem was, I wasn’t all that interested in sales. I did, however, have other talents that could be harnessed. W&T was looking to expand some of its PR and marketing initiatives, projects that I was eager to tackle. Would they hire me for a position that didn’t exist yet? We gave it a few days of thought and one updated job description later, I was officially on board as the business development and communications guru.

So there you have it. Kids, the surefire way to get a job is to interview at a company, confess that you’d rather do something else, and then work with them to come up with the perfect position for you. I now have a new role as the voice of W&T, a vehicle that allows me to write with expertise on sustainable seafood. I’ve learned how to negotiate a salary and how to identify companies I wouldn’t be a good fit for. I’m 3 for 3 with jobs that allow me to bike to work and don’t require dressing up. I feel like a winner.

This euphoria won’t last. But I felt the need to capture it—right now at 6 am—to bottle it for the next time I’m in a panic. It’s a potent homebrew of optimism built on proactive perseverance.

Feel free to take a sip when you need it.

Thanks again,
C