For your cheese recipe I recommend a good dry white wine.  (Please…do not use a cooking wine or cheap wine!  I did this once and UGH…what a disaster!)  Try out a good Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc.  Keep it on the semi-dry to dry side for best flavor in your cheese fondue and for drinking along with your fondue.I FIRST tasted octopus at its meaty yet tender best years ago in Athens, and have made sporadic efforts to replicate that experience ever since.My results have been inconsistent, often chewy and fibrous, whether the recipe I followed was Greek, Spanish, Italian or Japanese.The recipes themselves are all over the map with their advice for making octopus tender. Salting is essential to tenderness, or fatal; brief dips in boiling water tenderize, or long slow cooling, or a rubbing with grated daikon, or the addition of a wine cork to the cooking liquid.Last week I stumbled on a Greek food scientist’s report that small amounts of vinegar tenderize octopus. A solid lead at last!

I decided to revisit octopus and really figure it out.Twenty pounds of octopus later, I have my own report to offer. Forget vinegar and daikon and dipping and wine corks comically bobbing in the cooking liquid. Instead, try brining this creature from the briny deep.Or, give octopus juice a chance to do the stewing.Like its cephalopod cousin the squid, the octopus has no bones. Most of its meat is in its eight arms, which are so elegant an evolutionary design that they’ve become a model for robotics engineers, who call them “hyperredundant manipulators.”What’s inspiration for a robot designer brings frustration for the cook. Without a skeleton to support the muscles and anchor them with tough tendons, the octopus arm muscles support each other, and the anchoring connective tissues are spread throughout the muscles. They’re much tougher than the connective tissues of bony fish. Octopus connective tissue has to be heated to around 130 degrees before it begins to dissolve into gelatin, and it dissolves quickly only near the boil.

That’s why most recipes advise boiling or simmering. I experimented with a variety of temperatures and times, and got the best results at 190 to 200 degrees, below a bare simmer. The arms of a four- or five-pound octopus can take four or five hours to soften. The Greek food scientist proposed cooking octopus with a little vinegar because its acetic acid dissolves octopus connective tissue. I found that to be true.But I also found that vinegar breaks down the resulting gelatin. best 2011 wines to ageThis leaves the cooked muscle fibers with no gelatinous lubrication, and the meat more fibrous than ever.where to buy wine in york pa When the vinegar treatment highlighted the fibrousness of the muscle fibers for me, I realized they need softening, too, not just the connective tissue.best winemakers in the world

I read that more than half of the octopus fiber proteins will dissolve in a strong salt solution. So I tried to weaken the fibers with brining. I soaked pieces of arm for a couple of hours in a 5 percent salt solution — about three tablespoons of granular salt per quart water — and then simmered them in plain water until tender. Sure enough, the flesh came out noticeably less fibrous, and not excessively salty. Brining and gentle simmering work well to optimize octopus texture, but I found that they don’t make the most of octopus flavor.best wine to drink with meat The arm flesh is around 80 percent moisture, which heat releases very easily. buy empty wine bottlesWhen I gently cooked raw octopus in a dry pan, it exuded more than half its weight in juices. buy organic red wine online

And they were attractive and delicious: pale pink from the skin pigments, mildly oceanic, but very savory and mouth-filling with the quality now known as umami. If you cook octopus in water, you dilute those juices and their flavor.So try this instead. Blanch the unbrined octopus arms for 30 seconds in boiling water, cook them in a covered dry pan in a 200-degree oven for four or five hours or until tender, and cool them slowly in their own juices. Pour off the juices and boil them down to concentrate them. You get tender octopus and a flavorful, colorful, gelatinous sauce. (Brining makes the sauce too salty.) Both the brined-simmered octopus and the self-braised octopus are consistently good, but not the revelation I remembered from my time in Greece. I thought of one last cookbook truism to test.Traditional octopus processing often involved beating or pounding the flesh to damage and tenderize its fibers. Modern writers generally claim that freezing does the same thing, and therefore frozen octopus is actually preferable to fresh.

But freezing is known to worsen fibrousness in cod and other fish, and I had a hunch that it might in octopus, too. Maybe the best octopus can only be made from fresh.Reliably fresh octopus is hard to find, so I ordered two live octopuses direct from the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. They didn’t survive the plane flight, but the skin pigments still swirled under my touch and the suckers clung to my fingers. Blanched for a few seconds and cut thin, a sample of the fresh arm meat was sweetly scallop-like and not too chewy. But cooking turned it bouncier than ever.After two days of aging in the refrigerator, the rest of the fresh octopus lost its sweetness, and after it was cooked, the texture was still fibrous.So freshness isn’t the key to revelatory octopus. The quest goes on.Meantime I’m glad to have rediscovered how good everyday octopus can be.Ingredients Method Ingredients3 tbsp olive oil Olive oil Probably the most widely-used oil in cooking, olive oil is pressed from fresh olives.

2 celery sticks, finely chopped Celery A collection of long, thick, juicy stalks around a central, tender heart, celery ranges in… 1 onion, finely chopped Onion Onions are endlessly versatile and an essential ingredient in countless recipes. 1 carrot (about 100g/4oz) finely chopped Carrot The carrot, with its distinctive bright orange colour, is one of the most versatile root… 3 garlic cloves, crushed140g pack cubetti di pancetta Pancetta Pancetta is Italian cured pork belly - the equivalent of streaky bacon. It has a deep, strong,… 500g pack beef mince (we used 10% fat) Beef The classic cut of meat for a British Sunday roast, beef is full of flavour, as well as being a… 500g pack pork mince or British veal mince200ml milk Milk One of the most widely used ingredients, milk is often referred to as a complete food. 2 x 400g cans chopped tomatoes Tomato A member of the nightshade family (along with aubergines, peppers and chillies), tomatoes are in… 2 bay leaves1 rosemary sprig Rosemary Rosemary's intense, fragrant aroma has traditionally been paired with lamb, chicken and game…

2 thyme sprigs ThymeThis popular herb grows in Europe, especially the Mediterranean, and is a member of the mint… 2 tsp dried oregano Oregano Closely related to marjoram, of which it is the wild equivalent, oregano has a coarser, more… 2 beef stock cubes500ml red wineabout 400g dried pasta sheets Pasta Pasta is the Italian name for Italy's version of a basic foodstuff which is made in many… 50g Parmesan, finely grated Parmesan Parmesan is a straw-coloured hard cheese with a natural yellow rind and rich, fruity flavour. For the bechamel sauce1½ l milk Milk One of the most widely used ingredients, milk is often referred to as a complete food. 1 onion, thickly sliced Onion Onions are endlessly versatile and an essential ingredient in countless recipes. 3 bay leaves3 cloves Clove The dry, unopened flower bud of the tropical myrtle tree family used to flavour a wide variety… 100g butter Butter Butter is made when lactic-acid producing bacteria are added to cream and churned to make an…

100g plain flourgood grating of nutmeg Nutmeg One of the most useful of spices for both sweet and savoury… MethodFirst infuse the milk for the béchamel sauce. Put the milk, onion, bay and cloves into a large saucepan and bring very gently just up to the boil. Turn off the heat and set aside for 1 hr to infuse.For the meat sauce, put the oil, celery, onion, carrot, garlic and pancetta in another large saucepan. Gently cook together until the veg are soft but not coloured. Tip in all the mince, the milk and tomatoes. Using a wooden spoon, stir together and break up and mash the lumps of mince against the sides of the pan. When the mince is mostly broken down, stir in all the herbs, the stock cubes and wine, and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook for 1 hr, stirring occasionally to stop the bottom catching. Uncover and gently simmer for another 30 mins-1 hr until the meat is tender and saucy. To finish the béchamel, strain the milk through a fine sieve into one or two jugs. Melt the butter in the same pan then, using a wooden spoon, mix in the flour and cook for 2 mins.