4 days ago
How a flood of cheap British octopus is changing restaurant menus
They've been described as the Einsteins of the sea and are so intelligent they can navigate mazes and use tools. But today, the common octopus is finding its way onto the plates of diners across the country after an influx of the cephalopods to British oceans not seen for 75 years.
The sudden increase, known as an octopus 'bloom', is primarily due to warming ocean temperatures caused by climate change. The common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) is usually found in the Mediterranean, while Britain's cooler waters are typically home to the curled octopus (Eledone cirrhosa).
'We had an unusually warm winter this year,' said Bryce Stewart, senior research fellow at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. 'Those warm temperatures have continued through the spring and into summer, which favours the common octopus as it's a warm-water species.' Analysis of Met Office data suggests the average surface temperature of UK waters in the first seven months of the year was more than 0.2C higher than any year since 1980.
Stewart said this year's bloom was the largest since 1950. 'Fishermen started to see more octopus off the south coast of England in 2022 and then more again in 2023. It eased off last year but this year numbers have exploded,' he said.
In June, the Marine Management Organisation recorded 400 tonnes of octopuses caught off the British coast, compared with about ten tonnes in the same month last year. Last month provisional figures showed it was almost 500.
Stewart's team is working with the University of Plymouth to track the octopuses, using underwater cameras in the hope of predicting future blooms.
But for British restaurateurs, the increase has created a unique opportunity to use what was previously a prohibitively expensive ingredient.
Rick Toogood, head chef of Little Prawn in Padstow, Cornwall, and Prawn on the Lawn in Islington, north London, said that serving octopus previously meant importing it frozen from Spain at up to £20 per kg. 'Now that there is quite a bit of octopus it's come down to around £11 per kilogram,' he said. 'We obviously want to source as much as we can from our shores and this means if we want to put octopus on the menu we can get British-caught pretty much whenever we want it.'
Toogood said the rising ocean temperature also meant an increase in other fish used to warmer waters, including bluefin tuna. On Thursday afternoon he received a 40kg bluefin that would have cost more than £1,200 last year. This time he only paid £650.
Isaac McHale, the head chef and co-owner of Bar Valette in Shoreditch, east London, said he had also been serving up an abundance of tuna, but the star of the show became the octopus once he heard of the bloom at the start of the summer. 'Octopus is typically not very common in the UK so we don't have this history of eating octopus,' he said.
McHale said the curled octopus, which has a single row of suckers on each tentacle, was smaller and tougher than the larger common octopus. In other words, 'not great eating', the chef said. In contrast, the common octopus, which is larger and has two rows of suckers, is versatile enough to be cooked either hot and fast or low and slow.
Although the bloom has been a boon for chefs, not everyone has been excited. The common octopus feeds on crustaceans including crabs, lobsters and scallops, whose populations have plummeted on the south coast.
Mike Roach, deputy chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations, said some vessels in Devon had a 'complete absence of crab and lobster in their catches'.
The Marine Management Organisation recorded that the brown crab catch was just over 400 tonnes last month, almost 200 tonnes fewer than the same month in 2023.
Roach said the 'short-term influx' of octopus could mean a 'reduction in crustacean and shellfish species that are relatively slow growing and may take a long time to recover from this bloom of new predators'.
In May, the octopus bloom forced Plymouth city council to relax regulations that required fishermen to include a small gap in lobster and crab pots for undersized crustaceans to escape through. Because octopuses don't have bones, they are able to squeeze through tiny holes to feast on the shellfish inside.
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Animal rights campaigners are also concerned. In 2022, parliament recognised the highly intelligent octopus as a 'sentient being' as part of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act. Elisa Allen, vice-president of programmes for the campaign group Peta, said: 'These extraordinary animals deserve our respect and to be left in peace, not pieces.'
The bloom is unlikely to last for long because the overabundance of octopuses is rapidly depleting their main food source by gorging on lobsters, crabs and shellfish. But while it continues, chefs such as Toogood will continue finding inventive ways to serve it up to hungry diners.
At Little Prawn, he cooks the octopus with aromatics for two hours until tender. He then slices it and uses a blowtorch to give it a smoky flavour, before serving it with fresh tomatoes and an olive brine. Each octopus salad dish costs £13.50 and the chef said it was 'incredibly popular'.
McHale said it was important to thoroughly clean the suckers with salt and water before cooking. 'Then you slowly dip the tendrils into a large pot of boiling water over and over again, which helps the tentacles to curl in an attractive way,' he said.
At Bar Valette, McHale boils them for an hour before finishing them on a barbecue. At The Clove Club, he serves it alongside arroz brut, a rice soup from Mallorca.
McHale said he hoped the inflated octopus supply lasted a little longer. 'Part of the joy of being a chef is getting to play with new ingredients and find ways that you can make them delicious,' he said. 'Octopus is one of those things that most people in the UK might turn their noses up at. But it's nice to change their perceptions and show that it can be really delicious.'
