There's some show on TV called "Chopped" that my wife likes and I sometimes watch with her.  The premise of the show is that four non-famous chefs are given random and usually weird ingredients and then have to cook a meal using all those ingredients (plus whatever else they want).  Their meals are judged by famous/successful chefs.  One person is eliminated (or "chopped) after each round, eventually resulting in a winner.

On a recent show, one of the ingredients was octopus.  One of the chefs, a practicing Jew, said something about how she had no experience cooking with Octopus because she tries to keep kosher and doesn't use shellfish.  I just wrote that off as a religious rule that wasn't based on scientific classification.  But then another contestant commented that she didn't eat octopus because she's allergic to shellfish.  That made me wonder...

So is octopus considered a shellfish according to the rules of Judaism?  Does it have something in it that would react with people who are allergic to shellfish?

Dunno about the Kosher laws, but I would bet that Octopus are classified with Mollusks for a reason...

It's a mollusk indeed. A cephalopod

Octopuses are Molluscs.

I remember learning that they were mollusks back when I was a kid in science class.  So were those contestants on the show talking out of their asses?

Their beak is the shell.

To bad they did not feed raw blue ringed octopi to the retarded judges.

Never had octopus. Squid is freakin delicious though.

nevermind

I thought they had a hard part of their body(not the beak) that was considered their "shell".
Off to wiki

Edit-No hard part to their body except their beak. They do have 3 hearts though.

There's two kinds of octopus.

Mmmmmm octopus   Cooked right it's delicious! Used to have seasons stone crabbing when about every trap i hauled had one in it, they crawled in and ate every MF in the trap. Good eats! especially in spaghetti sauce.

Octopods.





You must be a Nazi, then.

Octopoda IS the plural.

dude, whatever. I pulled that stuff off wikipedia to help OP since I like learning new stuff too.

 

I just caught one diving yesterday and ate it. It was delicious.

I boiled it in beer and then breaded and fried the legs. Mmmmmmmmmm.

According to Jewish dietary law - octopus, crab, lobster, clam, swordfish and sturgeon are not Kosher (trayf).

Why not swordfish and sturgeon?

Fish that don't have scales...meaning anything that lives in the water that doesn't have scales...aren't allowed.


No,it doesn't make much sense to the rest of us that carp are OK but catfish aren't but whatever,their silly rules are their silly rules.