Tender-Simmered Octopus

For tender-simmered octopus (tako yawaraka-ni), wash the octopus normally without using salt. It's just washed in water, though washing it with something like flour works fine too. Using salt firms up the flesh, so that's the one thing I avoid. Grated daikon is really the best option, but it ends up taking a substantial amount, so I just wash it thoroughly in water instead.

After washing it once in water, blanch it briefly (shimo-furi), and then wash each individual sucker to clean off any sand and grit thoroughly. One point to watch is that this is a medium-strength blanch, somewhat firmer than a typical shimo-furi, but it's still just a blanch, so the octopus is still essentially raw at this stage. After that, you clean the suckers once more, so blanch it only enough to allow that second cleaning. The suckers tend to trap floating debris and harbor a lot of bacteria, so make sure to remove any grime thoroughly.

Next, you settle it into the pot and start reconstituting it, using bancha (coarse green tea) and bonito flakes for that step as well. At this point, the first thing you need to do is properly weave the bamboo mesh mat (shiki-zaru) that lines the bottom, as preparation. This varies slightly depending on which pot you're using, so you weave it while fitting it snugly to the pot. Some of the mats we use were woven last year, but if you keep them well washed, they'll last about two years. If a mat isn't woven tightly enough, it can come apart when you lift the contents partway through, and that ruins everything — it's a step important enough that it can actually change how the dish turns out in the end. The shiki-zaru mat is something prepared by the assistant working under whoever is in charge of simmering the octopus and similar items. Looking at the month's schedule, that person judges how many pots and how many mats will be needed for whatever's being cooked on a given day, and preparing them in advance is the job of the waki-nabe (the pot-prep assistant). And this isn't done during the actual cooking work itself — it's done in whatever spare time is available. By the time someone says 'we're cooking this, bring the pot,' the mats need to already be ready, and woven solidly at that. When you settle everything into the pot and put it over heat, you place a weight (omoshi) on top so the contents don't float around too much as you apply heat. It takes about two days before it's properly reconstituted, though these days some people use a pressure cooker to do it. In our case, though, it's not just about reconstituting it — we're also working the seasoning in deep enough for it to keep, which is why it takes that much time. It doesn't penetrate all the way through completely, but we bring it close to that point. The fibers of octopus or squid aren't actually hard to digest when eaten, but they really do firm up. So you reconstitute it once until the octopus fibers have all gone fully soft, and once it's softened to a certain point, it then firms right back up again — and from there, you boil it once more to break down all the fibers completely.

Once it's fully reconstituted, lift it out of the water once, and then season it and simmer it down. While simmering it down, don't move the pot itself — instead, adjust for the heat by shifting the position of the mat and its contents together as a whole. You just keep reducing it down and down, but for the very last stage of the broth, if you're making five pots' worth, you always combine all five pots together once to correct the seasoning, and only then divide it back out again.

As for seasoning, one thing that really has changed from the old days is that the amount of sugar used has come down. I wouldn't say it's half of what it used to be, but it's been reduced quite a bit. That puts us at a disadvantage in terms of keeping quality, but there's no point making something no one wants to eat (something that isn't delicious), and there's no sense making it purely as a preserved food either, so we're working toward making something guests can genuinely enjoy the flavor of. If you take the time in preparing it properly, it resists spoiling and keeps well even with less sugar. One pot holds about five or six pieces, and since we only have a limited number of burners, seven pots is the maximum amount we can make at one time.

With octopus, the character of the flesh is stronger than that of the skin, so while it's simmering, the skin tends to peel away easily. When that happens, the color and sheen suffer noticeably, so keeping the skin from peeling while it simmers is one of the genuinely difficult parts of this cooking method. And you also have to keep the suckers (ibo) from tearing off — since this is an auspicious food (engimono) used for New Year's, it's no good if pieces come off, peel away, separate, or tear; you need to keep it as intact as possible.