Sous Vide Octopus with Tuom White Garlic Sauce

Cooking octopus loses 2/3 of its weight; sous vide captures the liquid. Fiercely garlicky Toum is a barely stable emulsion that can break easily. These are notes on prep and how to do better next time.

Octopus

We had a 500g pack of 3 small octopi, human hand sized, from a Korean supermarket. We knew we would lose a lot of the weight to liquid in the cooking, so we cooked them sealed in a bag, sous vide, to capture the tasty liquid (it's great for making things like risotto, and has enough gelatin that it sets up like a good stock when chilled).  We added just a bit of pepper, lemon peel, and a bay leaf, and cooked 5 hours at 75C.

We ended up with 180g of octopus, so just over 1/3 of the original weight. I  probably should have done a more thorough job of rinsing the gelatinous skin off, but with beasts this small, it was difficult. For service, I cut the tentacles apart and flashed in a skillet with a bit of olive oil.

The texture was OK, tender but not mushy. I think for this size octopus, I might cook lower or shorter to give more bite. These beasts didn't have much flavor.

Next time, we'll hit a restaurant supply store for big octopi -- for texture and presentation. They can run $10/pound, so if you lose 2/3, that's $30/pound by the time it hits your plate!

Toum

We had squid with a fiery garlic sauce that was blindingly white at a small Sicilian place, Caffe Sport, in San Francisco decades ago; that flavor and color have stuck with me to this day. We've tried to create it with various aioli in Catalan, Spanish, and French styles. The French ones use egg, which gave a yellow color and diluted the flavor; Jose Andres does the classic Spanish prep, crushing garlic in a mortar and pestle and adding oil drop-by-drop; we've tried it, only to have it break when we finished 30 minutes later.

We found a Lebanese garlic sauce called "Toum" that sounded right: lots of garlic, plus oil, salt and a bit of lemon juice -- no egg.  We whipped one up based on the Serious Eats recipe, which was similar to many others we found.  Garlic is whizzed in a food processor with some salt to break it down, releasing the juices that contain the weak emulsifier, then oil is added very very slowly to establish the emulsion, then alternate lemon juice and oil to finish. 

We whizzed 2.5 ounces peeled garlic cloves (1.5 heads) with about 1 teaspoon salt, and scraped down the sides periodically to ensure breakdown. This volume was really too small for a full-sized processor so I added 2 teaspoons of the lemon juice and 2 teaspoons of water to provide more volume; finally, it seemed to be a good mush.  Then I dribbled neutral Canola oil very very slowly and watched the emulsion form. I kept adding, and it built very nicely; the total was 1.5 Cups of oil.  I tasted it and was shocked at how very "hot", like chile pepper hot, this was; not for the faint of heart!

Then I destroyed it. 

I thought it could use a bit more salt and lemon, so added a tad of each. When I whizzed it to combine, I immediately heard the sloshing of liquid -- I'd broken the emulsion.  Irene said you can't add anything and process after the emulsion is formed, so next time I won't. Either add all the flavorings at the beginning, or perhaps gently fold in additional seasoning.

We rescued it by whizzing an egg, then drizzling in the broken Toum, and it worked with the octopus and patatas bravas we had for dinner. This made it an aioli rather than Toum.

Next time, don't screw with it.  It makes quite a bit, considering how powerful it is, but the egg-free authentic version will keep for  a month in the fridge.  A dollop on paella, fideuà, steak, or myriad other things will certainly pump up the flavor!