Where does Pulpo a la gallega come from?

This is the most typical way to prepare octopus in Galicia, as you can notice from the name of the dish: Pulpo a la Gallega, which literally means octopus in Galicia’s way. There is no gathering, religious pilgrimage or fair in any city or village of Galicia that doesn’t have a place to eat a good octopus.

One of the main difficulties that octopus preparation has is the hardness of it meat, because it has a lot of fiber, so the first thing you need is to tenderize it.

There are several ways to tenderize the meat of the octopus, the most traditional ones are to hit the octopus or hang it from ties and leave it there in the sun for two days. As I say afterwards, what people usually do nowadays is to freeze and defrost it afterwards, which makes the preparation way easier. The target of these methods is to break the fibres of the octopus meat, and you can do that with any of them.

So, now that you know a little more about the recipe… Let’s start with it!

What is the origin of Pulpo a la gallega?

Although even from Greek times, the octopus was considered as an exquisite, it wasn’t until the maragatos, when the recipe started to be like the one we know right now.

In the beginning, the maragatos, started eating dry octopus that the people from Galicia didn’t used for the realisation of their recipes. They started to hydrate it with Olive Oil and sweet paprika, that they used to commercialize every day.

This way of preparing the octopus, soon started to become famous and successful, so the people from Galicia started to add the dish to their usual cookbook.

There are two varietis of this recipe. The first one is called “Pulpo à feira” and the other one is “Pulpo a la gallega”, the only difference between them is that the second one also includes cooked potatoes in the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 octopus of 1 kg.
• 4 potatoes.
• 1 small onion.
• 2 dry leaves of bay.
• Virgin Extra Olive Oil.
• Sweet paprika.
• Salt

Time of preparation: 1 hour.

How to cook Pulpo a la gallega:

First step: Ingredients preparation.

First of all, we are going to prepare the octopus. The octopus meat use to be especially consistent so, if we have just bought it and we want to cook it directly, we have to beat it up with a kitchen hammer, in order to have a soft meat after cooking.Afterwards, clean, peel the potatoes and cut them in generous dices.

Finally peel and clean the onion, but don’t cut it.

Top Tip: beat the octopus up is really a hard task, so we can get the same effect buying the octopus in advance, freeze them for 24 hours and then defrost it and it will be ready to cook.

Top Tip: if you don’t want the potatoes to melt, you better don’t finish the cut when dicing, don’t finish the cut. This mean, make a small cut and then pull out the rest of the piece.

Second step: Cook the octopus.

Put a big pot with water until the middle of it and add the 2 dry leaves of bay and the onion that we have clean and peel before.

Now put the pot on the fire with high heat, cover it and wait until it is boiling.

When the water starts boiling, we should “Asustar” the octopus 3 or 4 times before leaving it inside.

Now low the heat and cook 30 minutes.

Top Tip: “Asustar” the octopus literally means to frighten it. It consists in putting the octopus inside boiling water and taking it outside softly until it shrinks a little. With 3 or 4 times, it should be enough.

Top Tip: the time you need to cook an octopus properly use to be 30 minutes for each kilogram of octopus, that is why I said we need to cook for 30 minutes.

Third step: Cook the potatoes.

After this 30 minutes, we should take the octopus out of the pot and preserve.

Don’t remove the pot from the fire, because we are going to put the pieces of potato inside.

Meanwhile the potatoes are cooking, we are going to take the kitchen scissors and cut the octopus in generous pieces.

When the potatoes are completely cooked, remove them from the fire and preserve. We are not going to use the onion and the bay leaves anymore so you can throw them away.

Top Tip: we are going to put the potatoes inside the same water we have used to cook the octopus. The reason is that we want them to take some of the taste of the octopus so, don’t throw the water away after taking the octopus out!

Final Step.

Now that we have the main characters of our recipe prepared, is time to serve them. For that we should put a basis of potatoes and, on them, we put the slices of octopus.

Finally, we should sprinkle the sweet paprika and olive oil on the pieces of octopus. Our dish is ready to eat!

Top Tip: sprinkle the olive oil after sprinkling the sweet paprika. If not, all the paprika will finish on the plate instead of on the octopus.