Francisco dives into the bays in the area nearly every day of the week, bringing in anywhere from twenty to forty octopuses per trip, each of which weighs roughly two pounds. His method is ancient and bare-bones, to say the least. Armed with only a thin, yard-long metal stick with a hook attached to the end of it, and wearing only a tight, faded Speedo, some cracked flippers, and an ancient diving mask, he flips over the gunwale and out of the boat. I follow him. He starts out by diving twenty feet under the water and hovering there for a minute or two. At this point, he’s not even looking for octopus, just checking out the visibility and current, but all the while he’s expanding his lungs’ capacity to hold oxygen. By the time he finds a good spot to look for octopus, he’s able to hold his breath for four or five minutes, which seems like an eternity when you’re sitting in the boat or floating nearby hoping your diving buddy—and only means of transport back to shore—isn’t dead.
The second-largest type of octopus in the world is the North Pacific octopus, which can grow to thirty feet and weigh up to one hundred pounds. The smallest species is the California octopus, which maxes out at about an inch.
Francisco started me out on a few of the tamer dives, but after a few short lessons, we were off in search of our catch together. I should remind you at this point that I am five feet ten inches tall, weigh 240 pounds, and exercise as often as I can, which is about once a month. My idea of fun water sports is not heading ten miles from the nearest dock and free diving in deep water with a swift current in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But sitting with Francisco, prodded by his immensely toothy grin and halting guarantees of my safety, with my kitchen Spanish as our only means of communication, gave me all the confidence I needed. Besides, if we catch octopus, we eat octopus, right?
TAKING IN OUR SURROUNDINGS
The water in Tagolunda Bay, especially at the two outermost points of the bay, was some of the cleanest, most pristine ocean that I’ve ever spent time in. The seabed here is composed entirely of rocks and boulders, which means that there is no sand to be stirred up and cloud the water. These conditions are what Francisco looks for in a good octopus bed. You could see hundreds of feet in every direction. The water was teeming with bait and sport fish. The morning sun afforded us some incredible light as it entered the water. It was just absolutely breathtaking.
I wish I could have enjoyed the setting as much as I would have liked while I was in the water itself. Even though I was with a pro, my nervousness wouldn’t subside. I was in water up to forty feet deep and fighting a ferocious current. In this part of the Pacific, you need to be careful not to get too close to shore or the rolling surf will smash you against the rocks. The entire time I was diving, I struggled to stay at least twenty-five feet off the shore, simply holding my position so I wouldn’t get distracted and, subsequently, pulverized.
Of course, octopuses aren’t always such easy picking. When they aren’t feeding, they tend to squeeze their invertebrate bodies into the rocky nooks and crannies. Francisco poked around the large, round boulders that made up the underwater terrain, trying to coax the little cephalopods into the open. If he can’t grab them with his hand, he’ll hook them and place them in his free hand. Oddly enough, the octopus inadvertently aids this part of the process by clinging to your hand with its suction-cup-covered tentacles. Once back floating alongside the boat, Francisco demonstrated how to hold the octopus by putting your finger in and around the area of its mouth, which sits on the underside of the head, and sort of squeezing and holding him there. Don’t put your fingers directly in its mouth. Octopuses have sturdy beaks, and trust me, you don’t want to get nipped by an octopus beak.
~The majority of octopuses have almost entirely soft bodies with no internal skeleton. That means no protective outer shell or internal bones. This enables them to squeeze through narrow crevices—helpful when trying to outrun predators. ~Octopuses have an excellent sense of touch. Their tentacles are equipped with suction cups that not only help them grip but also allow them to taste whatever they’re touching.
~The only hard part on an octopus’s body is the beak, which resembles a parrot’s.
Within a few hours, we’d filled our boat with all the octopus we had come for, but Francisco wanted to make a few more stops on the way back to Santa Cruz and the dock. On our return trip, we went through the majestic Chahue Bay. The views here were nothing short of stunning: limestone cliffs dramatically plunging into the water, giant boulders with waves slapping over them. We dropped anchor and dove back into the water to scare up a few more octopuses and take advantage of a little more underwater sightseeing before we headed back to a small town called La Crucecita. This is a charming seafront village that boasts some of the best seafood restaurants in southern Mexico, including El Grillo Marinero, which Francisco and his wife of twenty-six years, Pola, own.
While many octopuses are good eating, some species are very poisonous. Rule of thumb: The smaller the octopus, the more poisonous it is. The most deadly species is the blue-ringed octopus. Found mainly in Pacific Ocean tide pools off the coasts of Australia and Japan, this small speckled creature produces venom strong enough to kill a human.
While the shrimp and local red snapper are delicious, the especialidad de la casa is pulpo, or octopus. After we dropped our catch in the kitchen, Francisco went to get cleaned up. I stayed behind in the kitchen with Pola, who is known as one of the region’s best seafood chefs. Cooking octopus is a tough job, but Pola works efficiently and quickly, meticulously cleaning each octopus, discarding the head and viscera, preserving the ink sac for later use. Next, she butchers the octopuses and tenderizes the tentacles by pounding them by hand against a large stone perched next to the sink.
Lucky for me, all the octopuses here are small, and Pola made short work of kicking out several different versions of the house specialty, each one tasting more delicious and complex than the last. Francisco returned to the dining room and we sat down to eat. Pola started us off with octopus and shrimp cocktail, made up of steamed diced octopus and poached shrimp, cooled and sauced with onions, garlic, lime juice, cilantro, and fresh tomatoes, and served in a tall sundae glass with spoons and fresh tortilla chips. Think cold poached seafood that melts in your mouth bathed in the best gazpacho you can imagine. As we inhaled that dish, the octopus platters came rolling out of the kitchen one at a time.
POLA’S MENU
Next was Creole-style Mexican octopus, sautéed with some garlic and onions, fresh tomatoes and peppers, and finished with a little bit of wine, braised all together for fifteen or twenty minutes and served in its own reduced pan sauce with some rice and soft corn tortillas.
The second dish was fresh octopus cooked in wine with garlic and a healthy dose of the octopus ink. I adored this octopus version of a squid dish I first ate with my dad forty years ago when we traveled to Venice. The rich, thick black sauce that coats the octopus is slightly citrusy, and redolent in the most profound way of the dark, briny ocean. There is an earthy and deeply nutty taste that squid and octopus have, and cooking the animal in its own ink makes the perfect combination, not only allowing the whole animal to be used at once but also providing a beautiful flavor contrast thanks to the slightly lemony edge this particular ink offers.
But the dish that absolutely blew my mind was the garlic-and-salt-glazed pulpo al ajillo, which is a very traditional Oaxacan treatment and a centerpiece of southern Mexico’s grandmother cuisine. It’s a dish rarely found in restaurants. Pola takes ten cloves of garlic and about a teaspoon of sea salt and pounds these into a fine paste in her mortar, rolling the pestle around the interior of the vessel with quick, precise strokes. There is not a bit of garlic that’s larger than a grain of sand left in her mortar. Pola turns a burner on the stove to a very low setting and gets the pan hot. Keeping the burner on low, she puts a little bit of olive oil in the pan and begins to sauté the garlic-and-salt paste until it’s cooked through, custardy yellow and sweet to the taste, without that scorching acrid qu
ality to it. She then adds the octopus, cut into pieces, and cooks it for a few moments, then adds a splash of wine, covers the pan, and cooks it for about twenty minutes more, or until the octopus is tender. She takes the lid off and she lets the sauce and liquid cook down until it has evaporated entirely around the octopus, leaving all the flavor of that winey sauce concentrated inside this dish. All that is left other than the octopus is the garlic and olive oil; the liquids have done their job. She cranks up the heat for the last fifty seconds, basically caramelizing the garlic in the oil-coated seafood, where it clings to the octopus like a supersweet garlic candy coating. Now the octopus itself melts in your mouth with a sweet, earthy flavor that drove me nuts.
Some people are crazy about garlic; I’m not one of them. But this garlicky paste of goodness made for one of the best dishes I have ever eaten in my entire life, a simple technique-driven dish that I have made over and over again back home, using everything from shrimp to chicken. It’s easy.
WHEN TOURISM TAKES OVER
Hand-fishing for octopus on a sunny day in the Pacific is deceptively intoxicating, but long afterward I was stuck thinking about the future of fishermen like Francisco. His tiny town of La Crucecita and the once-sleepy port of Santa Cruz, where there was a vibrant fishing industry just a generation ago, is now home to parasailing, scuba-diving, and sea-kayaking companies. The town’s native culture is in desperate trouble due to tourism companies that can drop serious cash for the dockside real estate. They’re squeezing out people like Francisco, whose family is one of the original five that founded the towns back in the day when there was only fishing.
Unfortunately, tourism is not the only industry that has discovered this beautiful place. Giant fishing trawlers scoop up bycatch by the tens of thousands, meaning that in addition to the fish they’re intending to catch, they also bring in piles of unwanted fish and critters (like turtles, sharks, and dolphins). These untargeted catches often die, which makes sustaining native fish populations next to impossible. I love seafood more than anyone, but this method of fishing is irresponsible—it will likely result not only in the extinction of certain species, but in the certain deterioration of our oceans.
ALTERNATIVE EATING
Promoting artisan fishing would certainly help this community, as well as its volatile ecosystem. Francisco’s operation, old-school as it may be, is a model for how we can make it work. Take the animals by hand, catch only what you need, and let the fishery self-regulate. Once trawlers are sent packing, the octopus population will rebound quickly, due to the species’ ability to reproduce in a short amount of time.
Of course, getting people to care about an alternative protein, like octopus, is a hurdle in and of itself. While octopus is wildly popular in most other parts of the world, Americans perceive shrimp, black cod, tuna, and salmon as the sea fare with the most sex appeal and most table-friendly attributes. However, octopus (and the small whole fishes that the rest of the world eats regularly) should be on everyone’s radar and dining room table. These are some of the best-flavored kinds of sea fare, high in protein, low in calories, usually inexpensive, and fairly easy to prepare. Eating alternative proteins is the only way to ease the pressure on center-of-the-plate commodity foods like chicken, pork, and beef. Octopus is not a novelty item. It represents our salvation, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to go diving with Francisco in the first place.
A restaurant has a life span much like a dog’s. If it lasts seven or eight years, it has lived a healthy and decent life. If it makes it to ten or twelve, and can put a little money back into the investors’ pockets after paying off its opening and carrying costs, it’s had a really good life. But if a restaurant is a couple of hundred years old, passed down from generation to generation, and manages to continue serving up one of the best versions of its country’s national dish, which once fueled the most macho elements of the local culture—well, a restaurant of that caliber is more than just a precious family heirloom, it’s a national treasure.
MADRID: A CITY OF ABUNDANT CUISINE
Madrid has truly earned its chops as one of the world’s great eating cities, and simply walking down its winding cobblestone streets really got my taste buds going. Madrid’s food scene is made up of two very distinct culinary styles: traditional Spanish cuisine and extremely modern.
TRADITION: TAPAS
It is often joked that Madrid’s restaurants outnumber the local populace by about three to one, and Spaniards take advantage of that abundance every few hours. They not only eat—they enjoy food. And there is a big difference between mechanical and mindful eating. Business or social conversation is an excuse for snacking, and Spaniards have no issue with partaking of a leisurely lunch or eating well into the night, usually not even starting dinner until ten p.m. Remember, Spain is the culture that gave us tapas in the first place.
The Spanish are night owls, and dinner rarely starts before ten p.m. Of course, the time span between lunch and dinner is great, so Spaniards fill their tummies with tapas, or small plates of food meant to be shared. The postwork crowd fills tapas bars for snacks, often visiting a few in one evening.
There are a few ideas as to how this small-plate style of eating came to be. Some people will tell you it comes from farmworkers needing small bits of food to hold them over until the day’s main meal was served. Others claim a Spanish king came up with the concept. By law, every drink needed to be served with a bit of food to soak up the alcohol in order to sober up the wine-guzzling workforce. In any case, it’s a brilliant idea that still shapes the local and global food scene. In Spain, tapas just sprouted organically. It’s a grazing culture: You eat a wonderful breakfast and spend an hour or two enjoying a leisurely lunch. Midafternoon, you might stop at a ham shop before heading home after the day’s work. From seven p.m. until ten, you eat tapas and drink with your friends.
THE MUSEUM OF HAM
My tapas crawl that evening ended at Museo del Jamón, one of a small chain of ham restaurants that are really cathedrals of worship for eaters like myself. The name translates roughly as “museum of ham.” But the idea that great cured meats are under glass and safely away from overeager mouths, accessed only by an audio tour headset, is far from the case. Stroll into the store and all around you are belly-button-high marble counters behind which are more types of cured sausages, cured meats, meat salads, and traditional salume-style fare than you’ve ever seen in your life, hundreds and hundreds of varieties. Of course, they offer the all-star Ibérico dried and cured hams as well as Serrano hams, Spain’s version of prosciutto.
Iberian ham, or jamón ibérico, is one of the most prized meats in the world. The black Iberian pig lives primarily in the south and southwest parts of Spain. The pigs mostly chow down on barley, maize, herbs, roots, and acorns. In the weeks prior to slaughter, the pigs eat only acorns.
Their Bellota ham was arguably the finest cured ham I had ever eaten; you could taste the wild-pig goodness, the acorn and hazelnut diet, the delicate salting and air drying, and the thin yellow fat streaked through the meat and edging each slice tasted almost as divinely musty as the season’s first truffle. I know this sounds weird, but I love to wash down a meal at Museo del Jamón with a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. To me, it’s the perfect combination—like chocolate chip cookies and milk.
Even if the only Spanish phrase you know is “¿Dónde está el baño?” you can still navigate a tapas menu with this handy guide.
Aceitunas: Olives.
Albóndigas: Meatballs.
Bacalao: Dried salted codfish, served very thinly sliced and usually with bread and tomatoes.
Boquerones: White anchovies served in vinegar or deep-fried.
Calamares: Squid, cut in rings, dipped in batter, and deep-fried.
Chopitos: Tiny cuttlefish, battered and deep-fried. Also known as puntillitas.
Chorizo a la sidra: Chorizo sausage slowly cooked in cider.
Croquetas: Small croquettes, a common sight o
n bar counters and in homes across Spain, served as a tapa, a light lunch, or a dinner along with a salad.
Empanadas: Large or small turnovers filled with meats and vegetables.
Jamón ibérico: A prized Spanish cured ham known for its smooth texture and rich, savory taste
Manchego: A cheese made in the La Mancha region of Spain from sheep’s milk, aged anywhere from sixty days to two years.
Patatas bravas: Fried, diced potatoes served with salsa brava, a spicy tomato sauce.
Pimientos de Padrón: Small green peppers from Padrón (a municipality in the province of La Coruña in the region of Galicia) that are fried in olive oil. Most are very mild, but a few in each batch are quite spicy.
Pulpo: Octopus, typically served in small chunks and lightly salted.
Queso con anchoas: Castilla or Manchego cheese topped with anchovies.
Rajo: Pork seasoned with garlic and parsley.
Tortilla española: A type of omelet containing fried chunks of potatoes and sometimes onion.
Zamburiñas: Spanish scallops, often served in a tomato-based sauce.
So after stuffing my face for a couple of days, one of which included a percebes (goose-neck barnacles) pig-out of Roman proportions at La Trainera, the best traditional seafood restaurant in Madrid, I’d worked up the stamina to eat at Casa Botín. According to Guinness World Records, Casa Botín is the oldest restaurant in the world. The restaurant is scenically located on a narrow cobblestone street about a block off the Plaza Mayor, which was the site of heresy trials and subsequent burnings during the Spanish Inquisition. Botín cooks everything over wood in the same stoves and oven that have been pumping out suckling pigs and lambs every day since 1725. The ancient structure houses many small dining rooms, and it shows its age with its tilted stairs, antique window casements, servers who look pulled right out of central casting, and ecstatic customers slurping down bowls of the classics: squid braised in its own ink and stewed partridge with polenta.
Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food Page 6
