The Results - Arroz Con Pulpo (Octopus Paella)

First of all I feel like I need to apologize for the delay in posting the results to this recipe. I had cooked it for mothers day and planned to do all the post-cooking posting on Monday night.....but....I became an auntie! My sister-in-law got a very nice late mothers day present and I now have a tiny little niece call Sasha Belle. She's cute and at only a couple days old already taking up a whole heap of my time. So please forgive me, but if you want to blame someone, blame 4 day old Sasha! hehehe

So onto the results. I'm pleased to say that it turned out ok. I was really worried about it and thought that I would do a poor job. The rice was nice and fluffy, yay! and the octopus was extremely tender. I highly recommend cooking octopus this way. It was so tender, so much so that it withstood refrigeration and then microwaving the next day, and it was still as tender as when it first come out of the pan.

I did find it a bit bland though. I thought it needed a bit of a kick, maybe a little chilli, or maybe some smoked paprika so it could make up for the lack of other ingredients. I must say though, the next day it tasted a thousand times better. The flavours seemed to develop and become a bit more pronounced and in the end I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

So here are some photos.....

All the ingredients in to be cooked down for the sofrito

***

I'm so glad that I choose to cook the chicken to make the sofrito, it made it so extremely tasty. I had a little left over so on the next night I cooked some pasta and tossed the remaning sofrito into the pasta with a little olive oil. Gosh it was delicious. I will cook it again just to make this pasta dish.

Octopus cooking

***

The stock that the octopus made turned such a brilliant pink colour, almost violet. Once the rice was cooked in the stock, it turned it a pale grapefruit colour. Very pleasing to the eye.

Sofrito in the pan

***

Rice added and tossed to cook individual rice grains with sofrito

***

Followed by the stock

***

A few minutes later the rice has fluffed up and the octopus slices are arranged around the pan

***

Lastly, the parsely and paprika is scattered around the pan and its almost ready to be served

***

There is one thing that I got completly wrong though. My socorat (crust) turned out more burnt than crusty. But if I had taken the rice off the heat any sooner it would have been undercooked and possibly unplesant. Luckily the burnt socorat did not ruin the taste of the paella. 

Burnt socorat

***

I may not cooked this dish again, but I will deffinately cook my octopus in this way in the future. Everyone should try it, it will completely change your mind on what tender octopus is.