A foodie pilgrimage to northern Spain, in the company of a chef on a mission, means inventive fish dishes, fun at the market, friendly locals – and a battle with an octopus
It’s one thing to cook an octopus. It’s quite another to catch one, to actually haul an octopus out of the sea and try to convince yourself, as its tentacles wind around your arm, that you’ll be eating it for dinner, not the other way round. The Basque chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho, who has just opened a new restaurant in London called Sabor, has done plenty of the former. She can tell you in the finest detail how to select, prep, boil and serve – with olive oil, paprika and pinches of sea salt – these remarkable sea creatures.
What she hasn’t done is catch an octopus – until this morning. We are in a boat off the Galician coastal town of O Grove, in north-west Spain, and a fisherman in yellow oilskins named Felix Piñeiro is lifting octopus pots out of the steel-grey waters. Everything around us – the laid-back peninsula town, its neighbouring islands – is obscured by heavy mist, focusing our view on the task at hand.
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Source: Gaurdian
