Octopus Bao

Step 1 is to boil the octopus for a few hours to tenderize it. If you look online you will find some weird advice about tenderizing an octopus, like banging it against some rocks or cooking it with a wine cork in the pot. For me, just boiling it until a fork went in easily was enough. Before you grill it though, you will need to not only chop off the legs, but rub the excess skin off. It isn’t really hard to figure out. The skin is slimy and falling apart, while the meat is white, firm, and what you typically expect when you order octopus at a restaurant. Just be careful when taking the skin off cause you don’t want all the suckers to fall off too! Then just grill up the legs. You want a high heat here with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Nice and browned. The sauce for the legs. Just chop up the the octopus and add it to the sauce. Meanwhile, make the bread. I let this rise an hour and a half before rolling it out. Let them rise again for 20 minutes or so before throwing them into the steamer. All the other sandwich toppings ready to go. Bread, octopus with sauce, cucumber, pickled carrot, and cilantro. Yum! These were nice and spicy, and had good texture all throughout. The octopus is tender but just a little chewy, the veggies are crispy, and the bread is super soft. The best thing about them though, is how fresh, bright, and spicy they are. Octopus is intimidating to cook at home, but it’s all the rage at restaurants these days. Think about how impressed people would be if you served this at a party! It wasn’t even that hard in the end, it just needed to cook a bit before it was ready to work with.