This Tunisian style octopus pasta was made 6 years ago in order to make my first Tunisian food recipe video using footage I recently re-discovered on an old hard drive. I used an Olympus E-M10 camera, which I had mainly purchased to satisfy my passion for food photography at the time. Mind you, this was pre-Zwïta days but also when social media was still limited to sharing photos in the form of posts. Those days, I was mainly into photography but became drawn to videography after binge watching shows like ‘Parts Unknown’ by Anthony Bourdain, ‘F*ck That’s Delicious’ by Action Bronson, ‘Huang’s World’ by Eddie Huang, and the many Bon Appetit videos that were available on Youtube. The way the cameraman would get those perfect, mouth-watering food shots was inspiring and I wanted to try and emulate that with Tunisian food.
So one day I decided to use the video function of the camera and film the various steps of one of my favorite Tunisian dishes to see what it actually took to make a tasty looking recipe video.
It was… frustrating. I was supposed to edit the raw footage after filming but never actually followed through with it; probably out of laziness or fear of looking through hours of footage only to find that it's all garbage or maybe not having an outlet or platform to share it on yet... Looking through the raw footage now though, it wasn’t all that bad!
Anyways, give this “blast from the past” octopus pasta a try, you will not regret it! We highly recommend using Casarecce but of course any other pasta shape will work!
1. In a pot with boiling water, slowly add the octopus and leave it in for about 15 minutes total. Turn it over mid-way so that it gets evenly cooked. Afterwards, take it out and add it to a strainer so that it can cool down and stop dripping.
2. Once the octopus is cool enough, cut it into 1 to 2 inch pieces on a cutting board.
3. In another pot on medium heat, add the EVOO, octopus, minced garlic, tomato paste, harissa paste, salt, black pepper, and bay leaves. Stir and sauté for a few minutes then add the diced tomatoes and ½ cup to 1 cup of water depending on how thick you want the sauce to be. Stir and then simmer covered for about 10 minutes.
4. Add the paprika and turmeric, stir for a few minutes and then cover again. Allow to simmer on low heat for about 30 minutes and check on it occasionally.
5. Cook the pasta into another pot until almost al dente. When the pasta is done, transfer it into the pot with the sauce. Stir for a few minutes so that it finishes cooking and absorbs all the sauce.
6. Add the pasta to a large bowl or serve directly into individual plates. Crack some extra black pepper on top!
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